[HN Gopher] Google's new related search box optimizes for the wr...
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Google's new related search box optimizes for the wrong metric
Author : smitop
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-11-10 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smitop.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (smitop.com)
| vbernat wrote:
| They are likely to get penalized, thanks to the CLS metric.
| thomascz wrote:
| Layout shift. Google has an entire article [0] about why it's
| bad. But as this is likely never going away, I made a Chrome
| extension [1] (5 lines of code) that gets rid of the box.
|
| [0]: https://web.dev/cls/
|
| [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-people-
| also...
| zamadatix wrote:
| For anyone with uBlock Origin already installed these 2 rules
| should be equivalent to what this extension is doing:
| google.com##div[id^=eob]:nth-ancestor(1):style(height:auto
| !important;) google.com##div[id^=eob]
|
| Though "auto-genned div starts with eob" seems unlikely to last
| forever as a reliable method (Google News recently changed the
| div naming structure as an example). has-text():nth-ancestor(n)
| would be more reliable but a slightly less performant rule.
| grandpoobah wrote:
| The great irony is that Google of all companies should know this
| is poor UI design.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| I've also had this experience with Google Ads- they pop up a
| second after all results right where I'm about to click. And
| someone's paying for that click somewhere
| cosmotic wrote:
| After repeatedly updating user styles to remove that box from my
| google search results, I gave up and moved to Bing. The result
| quality has been great and the result pages are much better (less
| wikipedia-link-hiding than google). Plus I get tens of dollars in
| gift cards a year.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah. I swear Google has been burying Wikipedia as hard as it
| possibly can. Most of the top so-called "organic" results
| nowadays are commercial sites full of ads. Every year, Google
| squeezes more value out of their search engine at the expense
| of users. In the long run this should open the door for
| competitors to build a better product.
|
| Personally, I want to see an open source search engine. The
| world desperately needs community-run search that helps users
| find real information and real communities while filtering out
| all of the spam and other commercial garbage that has been
| gradually strangling the web over the past two decades and a
| bit.
|
| I think some of the pieces are already in place to do this.
| Community-run blacklists for plugins like uBlock Origin are
| comprehensive and well-maintained. A repository of crawled
| pages is already available from Common Crawl [1]. What we need
| is a search engine that makes use of these resources to index
| and rank results so that pages without ads and without
| obnoxious heavy Javascript are pushed to the top of the results
| page. Ideally, this engine would allow users to run NoScript
| and have a really smooth experience searching for and browsing
| clean sites without having to add stuff to their whitelist all
| the time.
|
| [1] https://commoncrawl.org
| [deleted]
| bionhoward wrote:
| Agreed, this box is really just annoying and I've never found it
| useful because it shifts everything down after the first paint,
| so you wind up clicking on a pop-up.
|
| I wish they'd delete it, and also wish the search box would steal
| the common feature from IDEs like Atom or VS Code, where you can
| highlight stuff and hit the " quote button to wrap it in quotes,
| for example. Maybe only a small subset of users would want to
| treat the search box like an IDE but it could shave a few seconds
| off searches when you need to wrap stuff in quotes. Just a random
| unrelated idea!
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| In my products one way I've tried to fix the UI jumping around
| when a separate network call responds is to add a facebook-style
| "shimmer" view while it loads. But that doesn't work when the box
| might be hidden based on the network response.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I remember a previous comment here on HN with a filter for ublock
| (or a similar blocker) that removes that suggestion box. I now
| use DDG but when I need to switch to Google you notice really
| quickly if the script is there or not.
| ivank wrote:
| The longer uBlock Origin rule in
| https://gist.github.com/mmazzarolo/34e5418aade64abe7618885e0...
| takes care of it, currently ! Hide the 'People
| also search for' slide-in box when going back on Google Search.
| ! We require the other attributes here to reduce the risk of
| false positives. www.google.com#$#div[id^=eob_][jscontrol
| ler][jsdata][jsaction][data-ved] { display: none !important; }
| Groxx wrote:
| When you do this (and I highly recommend doing it! using ad-
| blockers as crap-blockers is one of my favorite things about
| browsers!), please leave feedback somewhere! Otherwise you're
| nothing more someone that simply doesn't engage with a
| feature. That's unlikely to do much to help shift behavior
| away from building crap, as it's not _negative_ feedback in
| most cases - unused things are generally assumed to be
| harmless.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Thank you
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| This box is absolutely infuriating and frequently comes up for me
| using the repro steps in the article.
| gundmc wrote:
| How are you able to reproduce this? I didn't see steps in the
| article and I haven't seen this appear, but now I'm curious.
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(page generated 2021-11-10 23:01 UTC)