I remember a time where you would get multiple results from a search with no scrolling

can@sh.itjust.works to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 584 points –

Edit:

The poll stopped me in my tracks but it's actually even worse.

It should not take this long to get to imdb

Edit2: didn't even realize it thinks I'll "love it" based on things I look up. I don't think I'd like it.

Edit³: IMDb was the example I used without thinking. I'm aware that there's a link to it in the top card. It's the other web results that I don't already know about that I'd like to see. I now know there's a hidden "web" tab. There's also https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=example` but it's still mildly infuriating that you have to know about these things to get the basic results we expected for years.

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Damn. I switched to DDG like well over a year ago and thought I was just kind of putting up with it for the sake of privacy. Turns out I didn't know how good I have it

Exactly. I've been using DDG for years now and when I have to use Google search for whatever reason, I am quickly reminded how crap ggl is.

I just wish DDG would finally kill their Apple Maps. Over here they're so incredibly unusable it's just not funny any more. I'll take here maps before that POS.

It's so bad that on desktop, you can't even go and click on alternative elements on the map without explicitly changing your search terms to them. You see them, but they're non-interactive. So the incredibly common case "I remember the name of the restaurant next to this place" (or something similar) cannot be done on DDG, on account of getting Apple money to include their maps.

Completely agree! I wish you could choose which map to use. I still use and love google maps.

Using a specialized tool for the task is the way to go, in my opinion. I use OpenStreetMaps when I need to look at the map. If I'm looking for some famous(ish) place, I look it up on Wikipedia and jump to OSM from there.

It shouldn't take this long to get to imdb

In case anyone here isn't aware, you can directly search IMDB from DuckDuckGo by using the bang !imdb.

DDG is moving into the same direction. I had to use ublock to hide the news block that appears when I'm searching for a movie/show in order to avoid spoilers.

In fact this was one of the key features lauded about DDG in its early days, the "instant result"-boxes.

Google kinda only went hard on them afterwards, probably seeing a good idea over at DDG because for the vast majority of people, they're looking for answers and results, not specifically objects of type link-to-search-result. They don't need a list of links, so long as the information they were after is reliably in those generated cards.

See OP wanting an IMDB link, which is directly there as Google correctly assumed that's a very very very common use case for googling the name of a movie.

Kagi has all these options as well but everything can be disabled in the settings.

I had the identical reaction. Thanks OP for posting this repellent screenshot. So glad I changed my defaults.

A poll in the search results, what the heck?!

They're throwing shit at the wall I guess. Last week I got this in my YouTube feed:

Great, now they're going to start giving us exams before we're allowed to watch a video.

Are they trying to train an AI?

I doubt it. They know I'm into audio production and this is kind of a softball question. Maybe if they start giving me more advanced ones.

The Gemini logo next to the word "Experiment" makes me suspicious.

The quiz itself was definitely made by an AI.

I think it's just something creators can do to boost gain extra impressions but apparently they don't have to do it themselves anymore...

no, too stupid of a question

Simple questions with known answers might be a way to weed out malicious/untrustworthy responders.

Yes, control questions, in a form, with 20 other open-ended questions which answers actually have value.

This is solely for engagement. Trivia questions have no value for training models.

Here's duckduckgo result for comparison

Here's AskJeeves result for comparison

Damn, I knew Jeeves had fallen but this is actually baffling.

Did it spoil the movie in the suggested questions 💀

Probably, luckily I had no interest in watching it and looked it up for other reasons.

I know this won't be the answer people want, but to be perfectly frank if I know I want the IMDb page for a movie, I put IMDb in the query. It will put the page you want right at the top, none of that extra shit, and it will even probably predict what you're typing before you finish.

imdb wasn't really the point, that's on me, I could have also just tapped imdb on the card at the very top. It's the other sites that I don't know to search for that I would like to see promoted

Don't worry, Google is actually getting sued for its various malpractices (paying browsers millions to be their default search engine, Google adsense putting the best bidder at the top of the search results, etc). It might even come to the US justice system ordering the breakup of various Google products into smaller independent companies.

In fairness, IMDB is right there on the first info card.

As a side point: IMDB's page is even more obtuse and unnavigable than it was 5 years ago. Literally no hotbar...

Every front end design dev that graduated in the last decade is brain damaged

That’s Amazon’s way of working. They push the content that they want you to use over what you want to use.

This seems so fuckdamn back asswards to me. I mean the website experience is 80% of the service. Why alienate visitors for the CHANCE to upsell them when failure means they stop using the service?

I mean let's consider the opposite: What if every time you opened the page, stuff you WANTED was there instead of stuff THEY want you to want? I guarantee that would drive sales and satisfaction better than the impulse buy chinese shit that breaks in 3 uses.

It's not the individual contributors writing the website that are making these decisions, it's people in $1000 suits, sitting on the 44th floor of a Manhattan skyrise asking "how do we make red line go up?".

There were at least a group of people overseeing the redesign, and none of them thought that making the site harder to navigate would turn off visitors, all they saw was the opportunity to advertise even harder.

MBAs are ruining literally everything and it's getting to the point where they need to be dragged out into the streets.

I remember a time where you could get multiple search results without scrolling

So one doesn't count.

Yes, but their edit says that it shouldn’t take so long to get to IMDB which is what I was commenting on.

The fact that there is only one result is awful.

It was too good and offered no financial incentive for them to continue with it. It's better if users scroll endlessly looking for the information that used to simply be available instantly.

If anyone still wants to use google without this, you can use this url, replacing '%s' with your search

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

You can add it as a search engine on your browser for fewer steps. There are add-ons that can help you with that.

To be fair. All the information for the movie is right there at the top. If you wanted just info about the movie.

The poll though... Ya... That's kinda crazy.

You'd think that if you knew the answer to the poll question, you wouldn't have Googled the title of the movie. I just don't understand the thought process that led to this happening.

If you’ve seen a movie you wouldn’t search for it?

Not really, unless I wanted to know more about a specific part of it, like an explanation for a scene or the screen writer or wherever, and then I'd Google with keywords specific for that, not just the movie name. If I'm just searching a movie name it would probably be too know whether stuff Google throws up on top of their results, to be fair to them.

Tbf there's a link to imdb on the first image

Yeah I usually like the Google boxes in search results, but this is so excessive. Everything after and including the polls is just completely unnecessary

I switched to DuckDuckGo on all my devices and I get shocked that people can’t find anything when they search.

It sucks, yes. But, if you select the “web” tab instead of the “all” tab at the top of the page, you’ll get something more akin to what you’re looking for. There’s probably even a way to script it so that it defaults to that view.

Damn the second image in your post didn't load for me and it turned my Connect into an infinite grey screen

The polls are completely idiotic but I personally find info cards to be quite helpful.

The info cards are a cancer on the internet. They exist only so you stay on Google's page and don't follow a link to another site.

They exist only so you stay on Google’s page and don’t follow a link to another site.

That may be true, but I'd say in the neighborhood of 1/3 - 1/2 of my searches are answered by auto-compiled info cards or similar artifacts.

Just by way of example, my wife and I were casually researching cars lately, and one of the criteria is "does the damn thing fit in our garage??" Typing "Mazda CX-9 length" and having that specific info presented immediately is immensely preferable to clicking into edmonds.com and scrolling through an entire table of specifications.

But if you go to another site, Google will have to pay them when they show you adverts!

Seeing only (edit..) two to three // results per scroll is way too cramped.

I miss the early 2000s when you'd get like 15 or 20 search results a page on a 1280 monitor because hosts weren't BLIND.

Just switched to my own SearXNG instance. Won't go back. Even did a PR for better Google Answers integration.

SearXNG is the best

Man, I hate people like you, because I am constantly reminded of how I really need to get round to checking out Searx, but I never get round to it.

(I am joking, because the only person who is putting pressure on me about this is me, and that's because finding time to do this is something I want to do. Thank you for reminding me, even if I will keep procrastinating)

NGL, it's a pain in the ass to get it done the first time.

Docker -> Cloudflare is a lot of learning if you don't already have the skillset.

And it does have issues on locale based searches, when meta searches do geo lookups, you end up on partner nodes.

Screenshot_20240815-185141

Use a better search engine.

Those of you who "can't live without google", need to get a grip.

Those of you who "can't live without google"

Not something I have ever stated. And I actually did change the default Firefox search engine to DDG.

Android is the bigger hurdle but maybe the USA can surprise me and help out with that.

I use DDG most of the time but it sometimes struggles searching and finding in German.

Are those the Results of the Search of the Rise of the Return of the Planet of the Apes?

I havent used google as my search engine for a year now, I use duckduckgo instead, and it has been very few times where I have longed for (old) google.

I've been working on a stylus theme for all the sites I use including duckduckgo and startpage that cuts out any and all bullshit like this

Lmk if you want a copy of it, some of the sites work on mobile too if you're using a browser that supports extensions (Firefox)

I'm intrigued.

It's on github.com/flashgnash/material-monokai if you want to have a look. It's a bit rough around the edges and I've yet to find a way to properly source control it as stylus doesn't seem to save it to a file anywhere

I at some point intend to split out the theme and the anti annoyance CSS into two different themes as the theme makes some pretty drastic changes

I continue to be one of the happiest customers for Kagi, a service that I am so happy to pay (for my family as well).

To be clear, there are some widgets that might be useful in some cases, but it should not be all you see (and it should definitely not include similar stuff as if the focus for any search is just to find more stuff to consume and please advertisers...).

I use kagi as well and love it. Worth every dime.

People that say they can't see themselves paying for Search underestimate the value of clean high quality search results.

I'm a business owner and developer of firmware for esoteric products. I need high quality, powerful searches that don't waste my time. Kagi is great for that. I created lenses on Kagi that I can use to focus my searches, a great time saver for me.

100% agree. I've been using Kagi for a bit over a month now and I love it. My one and only complaint is business hours can be harder to find - I have to actually click into their website for it. That's it though! Everything else is dramatically less painful in my opinion. I don't need business hours frequently enough for it to matter though, and if needed I can use Google for that one thing.

Kagi has been a breath of fresh air

Completely agree, I started seeing business hours popping up lately, I know that they know it's an area of improvement.

It's a premium service but it has very nice features and is a good product overall.

Kagi's ceo statements makes me hate it

I am not a fan of some of his ideas either, especially the ones tending towards libertarianism. Some other ideas instead are quite decent, like how he thinks companies should give back to the community. He also built a tech company without VC funding and with a good share of ownership for workers (which I think is nice), without any marketing (which I despise as industry) and generally without the predatory nature that 98% of tech companies have nowadays.

I am sure you are referring to the Brave debacle of months back, and FWIW, I agree with his position on that particular issue. Anyway, considering that I have no ideas about the positions for the CEOs/founders of the alternatives, I think it's still a very worthy compromise to have a good product (incl. nonfunctional qualities like privacy, ecological impact etc.).

Getting 670k from a few private investors aint vc?

I havent heard about the brave debacle but some other comments ive seen make me really not trust this ceo

No, 670k from 42 investors means less than 20k of investment per investor. 670k is already a number ridiculously small for VC funding, but 20k is basically nothing.

Also, after just a few years, 37 employees and 30k users the company became profitable, which is an insanely low period/scale for usual VC funded tech companies.

'Member when they said 'don't be evil'?

all of us 'you cant keep relying on corporations, they will betray you, every single corporate product you consume is basically the one ring' open source nerds get to say the MOST satisfying "I told you so"'s. nobody cares, of course, you'll all keep using this shit, but it feels SO good.

open source nerds need to keep their fucking mouths shut until they deliver a end-user grade linux distro.

It's been 25 fuckdamn years already...

I mean, we do, and there are different philosophies of computing that have different effects on users, and the philosophy that users should be infantilized and USED instead of grown and nurtured as peddled by shit heads like steve jobs is exemplified by all the enshittification currently dominating every single thing you've bought in the last decade that had so much as an RFID chip in it.

but also, it would be great if windows would deliver an end user grade windows distro. i miss those.

the point is, these corporate products are not usable, they are not stable, and they are not a good long term decision. any business that uses these is unbelievably stupid and deserves to get crowdstruck. the fact that the instability is political and your shit can just be bricked remotely on zero notice rather than due to being difficult to configure is not a point in their favor.

And you wonder why people don't take linux cultists seriously...

yes, im a linux cultist who was really sad when windows 7 stopped getting updates.

instability is instability. you don't make a factory in a politically unstable place, and you don't use a product from a for-profit company that is prone to enshittification and could remotely brick it at any point without warning. risks are risks.

The IMDb is there at the top. Just Under the white YouTube box. It tells the rating. But if you click it goes to the IMDb page for it

This is why I use a search proxy. Still get Google results but with all the crap stripped away. Plus I can write custom search options so if I go ! imdb rise of the planet of the apes it will do the search and just take me to the first result

But this genuinely feels sensible?

The generated abstract includes the commonly needed links - including the IMDB you want and Rotten Tomatoes that I frequently want - and the very first result after that is Wikipedia for when you need that.

It's like the best abstraction so you don't have to wade through results, correctly understanding that if you search by just the title, you probably want information of through-links to common information/review sites.

They took it too far. A few cards can be convenient (though I feel bad for site runners) but the poll?

Dunno what is wrong with you guys, but IMDB is on the first page for me, with no scrolling. But I don't use my phone like a plebeian.