The best thing about this is that AMP links totally break “open this page in the website’s native app” links, which I encounter frequently, presumably because the browser is on an AMP proxy domain and thus the iOS native app URL listener doesn’t work. It’s absolutely shocking that such a core flow is completely broken by default when you’re coming from Google search results.
I would happily pay for an Open Source adblocker-style extension that intentionally breaks "do you want to download and install our app instead of using a perfectly reasonable web browser that you're in control of" pop-ups. If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.
(In general, an adblocker is one of the most valuable things I have installed. I wish EasyList had a subscription option; I'd happily pay to help support its maintenance.)
> If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.
For about 5 years now I've been actively going back to web pages for things.
Example: I no longer have the BBC News app installed. Instead I have a bookmark on my mobile home screen that goes to the BBC News web page.
What I've found is:
1. Most apps didn't need to be apps, there's nothing that they need access to that their web equivalent cannot already do.
2. The web pages are easier to control... i.e. Firefox on Android and ad-blocking is a joy.
3. Most of the web pages get richer experiences sooner than an app (if it ever gets an update), i.e. minisites on news sites around elections.
4. The web experiences are considerably faster on poorer networks.
5. The DNS logs show a massive reduction in tracking frameworks... even though the web is bloated, apps appear to also be bloated, but the web you can more easily control.
6. Better battery life across the board, probably due to nothing running in the background and no notifications being processed - also improved mental health as the device is now on my terms, pulling content when I want rather than being pushed it when an app wants to.
I block ads at the DNS level. Aside from 2-3 legitimate websites that broke as a result of this (because they use some Salesforce thing as a part of their site or similar), almost every unsubscribe link I get is now broken. I really wish there was some plug-in that would unroll those links to their final form since that’s usually fine but passes through 2-3 bukkshit redirects before it gets there.
Not always the case. Sometimes I'm looking for something and come across a link to a reddit thread. I'd like to jump to the app easily. What I don't like, however, is how hard websites try to block you from accessing their website without opening the app first.
Fair enough. I wish you had that option as well. But when I already have and use the apps, it’s pretty awful for Google to break links that certainly should open in those apps.
I don’t think Amp is that bad. The issue I described where it breaks iOS native app URL listeners is the only reason I am happy to purchase this extension.
> Safari extensions require your permission to run, so in the interest of transparency I wanted to make the app completely open source.
[...]
> License: This is open source in the interest of transparency, and I hope this doesn't need to be said but please don't take this as an opportunity to reupload the code and call it your own. This is the equivalent to the GitHub "No License", so you're more than welcome to inspect the code and audit it, but you do not have permission to repurpose it as your own.
I’d pay a good deal of money to have early 2010 style Google back.
Mainly:
- No AMP
- If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.
- One ad per query. These days the organic results are after the page fold. This is unacceptable for something that’s supposed to be a search engine.
—-
The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me.
I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. Just show me whatever it thinks I want based on everything it knows about me. And no, unfortunately verbatim doesn’t always help.
The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing.
This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better.
The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years.
We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.
I had a funny one today where I had some weird arguments for a CLI thing I was googling, so I put them in quotes, and Google continued to return results with the "not containing: foo bar | show only results with 'foo bar'" thing under them. Clicking the link just put more quotes into the search string, until my search bar looked like: wixl ''''''foo bar''''''.
Paid search engine that I switched to last month. Best feature is no ads. You can hook up your private data silos (Notion, Slack, Google, Dropbox etc) and all results appear directly in regular search.
I don’t ever see myself going back to whatever the fuck Google has morphed into over the years.
I'm interested but most search engines give terrible results for Australian searches (increasingly true for Google too, which used to be good at it). How does this one go at not being America-centric?
Update: I'll answer my own question. They didn't even let me sign up.
In my experience, DDG is just as bad as Google at producing results that don't match quotes exactly, and almost effectively just adding random results...
It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".
I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. They are even worse than google at honoring phrase search. In addition, google sometimes even tells you that they ignored some terms. DDG is just silently searching for some crap you never wanted to search for "to help you". It’s by far my #1 annoyance of DDG.
DuckDuckGo essentially ignores negated terms. Try searching for `49ers -football` and you get a front page full of football links and nothing about the gold rush.
After you do a search there's a 'tools' button. Clicking it gives you a dropdown with the option to change from 'all results' to 'verbatim'. There's also the 'Advanced Search' https://www.google.com/advanced_search where even if you enter a word in quotes in the 'this exact word or phrase' box you still get results without your query.
I don't have an example query, but it happens all the time. I put a query in quotes and google gives results that neither have the quote in the page blurb on google nor on the destination page.
Also not applying a political, moral, business-driven, or any other bias in returning results that they want me to see rather than what I want to see. It used to nearly perfectly match my intentions with the request until they got too big and caved to the establishment and money.
1) People in charge of these features know objectively how pissed off some of their users are. It's done for one simple reason - it brings more advertisement revenue. Google employs some of the smartest people on the planet and they have the demonstrable capacity to build what savvy users like yourself (and me) like.
2) Vast majority of the people are ambivalent and apathetic to these things. The scale at which Google operates is absolutely mind bogglingly massive. Savvy users are the extreme edgecase.
I just don't see any reason to expect a mass-market product or service to serve savvy users. There is a fundamental mismatch in expectation and requirements.
Firefox still supports mobile plugins but, a while ago (IIRC last year), the plugin API changed, as a result currently the selection of available plugins is much smaller than it used to be. I should add that I haven't checked in a few months, maybe it's improved now.
For example duckduckgo produce nothing useful when you search Chinese keywords. DDG maybe good at doing English searches but Google obviously have much more resources.
Thank you! If there is one thing where Google went to far its that abomination of bad UX and power abuse called AMP. I was fearing I will never get rid of it on iPhone. Would probably also have paid US$10
So, this happens almost daily: I’ll be reading news in an amp page hosted by Google, which I navigated to via Google news, within Google chrome, and half way through the article the page suddenly breaks and I see “Aw, Snap! Something when wrong while displaying this web page”.
There was a time in my life when I believed working for Google was the highest indication of talent. Now, I marvel at how a $1.6 trillion dollar company can’t even serve a page of text and images without fucking it up.
Readit News
This app fixes this problem!
(In general, an adblocker is one of the most valuable things I have installed. I wish EasyList had a subscription option; I'd happily pay to help support its maintenance.)
For about 5 years now I've been actively going back to web pages for things.
Example: I no longer have the BBC News app installed. Instead I have a bookmark on my mobile home screen that goes to the BBC News web page.
What I've found is:
1. Most apps didn't need to be apps, there's nothing that they need access to that their web equivalent cannot already do.
2. The web pages are easier to control... i.e. Firefox on Android and ad-blocking is a joy.
3. Most of the web pages get richer experiences sooner than an app (if it ever gets an update), i.e. minisites on news sites around elections.
4. The web experiences are considerably faster on poorer networks.
5. The DNS logs show a massive reduction in tracking frameworks... even though the web is bloated, apps appear to also be bloated, but the web you can more easily control.
6. Better battery life across the board, probably due to nothing running in the background and no notifications being processed - also improved mental health as the device is now on my terms, pulling content when I want rather than being pushed it when an app wants to.
It's overall a far better experience.
While not an extension, the DuckDuckGo browser app on iOS has exactly this feature. Maybe Firefox should consider building it in too!
The internet must be more than two proprietary app stores.
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pvvi83/googles_amp_p...
The program is opensource.
https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion
Most recent public fork I found is now mirrored here: https://github.com/3nprob/Amplosion
> Safari extensions require your permission to run, so in the interest of transparency I wanted to make the app completely open source.
[...]
> License: This is open source in the interest of transparency, and I hope this doesn't need to be said but please don't take this as an opportunity to reupload the code and call it your own. This is the equivalent to the GitHub "No License", so you're more than welcome to inspect the code and audit it, but you do not have permission to repurpose it as your own.
Mainly:
- No AMP
- If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.
- One ad per query. These days the organic results are after the page fold. This is unacceptable for something that’s supposed to be a search engine.
—-
The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. Just show me whatever it thinks I want based on everything it knows about me. And no, unfortunately verbatim doesn’t always help.
This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better.
The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years.
We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.
I'd pay significant money for this (20-30 USD/month), plus very few search operators that actually make sense (i.e. and, or, not).
But yeah, we got AI instead ... (pure crap IMO)
Paid search engine that I switched to last month. Best feature is no ads. You can hook up your private data silos (Notion, Slack, Google, Dropbox etc) and all results appear directly in regular search.
I don’t ever see myself going back to whatever the fuck Google has morphed into over the years.
Update: I'll answer my own question. They didn't even let me sign up.
Then google+ hijacked that and never gave it back.
It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".
I should try the opposite though: when Google SERP is useless, try others.
I don't have an example query, but it happens all the time. I put a query in quotes and google gives results that neither have the quote in the page blurb on google nor on the destination page.
1) People in charge of these features know objectively how pissed off some of their users are. It's done for one simple reason - it brings more advertisement revenue. Google employs some of the smartest people on the planet and they have the demonstrable capacity to build what savvy users like yourself (and me) like.
2) Vast majority of the people are ambivalent and apathetic to these things. The scale at which Google operates is absolutely mind bogglingly massive. Savvy users are the extreme edgecase.
I just don't see any reason to expect a mass-market product or service to serve savvy users. There is a fundamental mismatch in expectation and requirements.
I use dark reader on chrome for computers. They also have a safari extension that surprisingly works just as well.
https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader
https://darkreader.org/safari/
I'm concerned, though, whether these extensions work the same as chrome extensions.
Can they view and potentially upload your browser passwords/bank info/etc?
Is there some limitation that prevents this in the implementation?
I assume Apple doesn’t permit this so you’re kinda limited with an iDevice. (he says from his iPhone)
Google of course will never include such a thing
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
Deleted Comment
If DuckDuckGo did smarter results like this, I'd quit Google. Heck I'd even throw in a few bucks.
So does DuckDuckGo; here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/6nCNGZk
> ii) it does match right on the search page.
What do you mean by "match" here?
I don't know how much longer that will continue to work though. Many sites ignore it and show the mobile version anyway.
#1 most popular "tools" app in the App Store.
Google: Take the hint, please.
There was a time in my life when I believed working for Google was the highest indication of talent. Now, I marvel at how a $1.6 trillion dollar company can’t even serve a page of text and images without fucking it up.