Google Seeking "Search Without Search"

An anonymous reader writes "Forget Google Instant, the search giant is working on ways to push relevant info to users before they have even asked for it... Foursquare-style location 'check-ins' are also apparently on the way next year."

Comments

42

[kthreadd]

Just put it on the front page and be done with it.

Re:42

[index0]

"We have more important things to worry about. Like where are those French fries I did not ask for?"

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Just put it on the front page and be done with it.

Hitchhiker's Guide was great but no, please don't do that. Please don't modify Google's front page any further. Has anybody else used another person's computer and been shocked at how annoying and needlessly flashy Google Instant is, and been happy to return to your own NoScript-running browser? Oh yeah and as a bonus if you don't run Google's JS you get the actual URLs of the search results and not some redirection server that helps to track you.

The way they're trying to make Google Instant nice and politically correct, free of piracy or hacking terms that might "offend" someone reveals more than anything the kind of marketing mentality behind this stuff. All I want a search engine to do is accept my input of keywords, wait for me to press Enter, and then fetch the search results for what I typed. Just those three things. Any other features are bloat. I sure as hell don't want it guessing about what I want to search for when it's so easy to explicitly tell it that. The effort I make to not be tracked by anyone including Google would make such guesses unlikely to be correct anyway.

I think the problem here is that Google has produced such a fine basic search engine that has already become the dominant choice. Now they don't know when to quit and will keep trying to "improve" it even if these changes aren't improvements at all. Can't be perceived as stagnant and all of that, or so the marketers seem to think.

I mean damn, just think of the message behind Google Instant for a moment. "You typed three letters. 17,549,221 users who typed those three letters got these results. We'll just feel free to assume you couldn't want anything that they didn't want, see we got it all here in our statistics. After all, you are an individual, just like everybody else. You are fungible to us. And of course we'll save you the staggering, horrible, strenuous effort of pressing the Enter key because we are so helpful." Anyone else see it?

Re:42

[IAmGarethAdams]

Oh yeah and as a bonus if you don't run Google's JS you get the actual URLs of the search results and not some redirection server that helps to track you.

Yeah, I really hate it when a company looking to improve search results tries to find out which search results the user ends up choosing!

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody else used another person's computer and been shocked at how annoying and needlessly flashy Google Instant is, and been happy to return to your own NoScript-running browser?

No. I would use Bing before I use old-style Google again.

Re:42

[dwandy]

you forgot the obligatory "now get off my lawn..."

Re:42

[maxwell demon]

Actually it sounds more like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's vertical people transporters.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

From reading your post I get the feeling you didn't try Instant for more than 10 seconds before dismissing it. Once you've used it for a day or so, you might find that it's quite useful in that it often saves you the hassle of running multiple searches by immediadely suggesting what it is you were looking for.

I'm shocked by how many similarities some otherwise tech-savvy people share with the Luddites...

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. When you click a link in Google search results it clicks through to Google first. That's one of the biggest reasons I stopped using Google.

Re:42

[MozeeToby]

You typed three letters. 17,549,221 users who typed those three letters got these results. We'll just feel free to assume you couldn't want anything that they didn't want, see we got it all here in our statistics.

And 90% of the time they're right. The other 10% you might have to press a fourth letter (the horror!).

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the only way Google's malware detection can work (which I've triggered dozens of times). Disable JavaScript and Google does no more redirections.

Re:42

[drb226]

I think the problem here is that Google has produced such a fine basic search engine that has already become the dominant choice. Now they don't know when to quit and will keep trying to "improve" it even if these changes aren't improvements at all.

Disagree. I think the "problem" is that you are a power user. Google made google instant so that the infinite masses of non-tech-savvy grandmas can hunt-and-peck only a few keys, and end up with the search results they were looking for (since they were likely looking for the same thing as all of the other grandmas) without having to move their arthritic hands to move the mouse and click "go" (since they probably don't realize that you can just press "enter").

Warning: slight exaggeration used above.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah and as a bonus if you don't run Google's JS you get the actual URLs of the search results and not some redirection server that helps to track you.

Yeah, I really hate it when a company looking to improve search results tries to find out which search results the user ends up choosing!

Some users like me are already fully satisfied with the search results that come from Google's webcrawler and the algorithms it uses. FULLY satisfied, as in any further tweaking would only reduce satisfaction. Tracking the results I click on is further tweaking and it reduces satisfaction for those users. This is easy to understand.

What I really don't like is when some smarmy fool assumes that his own preferences should be great for everybody and should be viewed as an improvement by everybody. Tell ya what, if you like being tracked and think you're getting something of value for it, then continue to allow it. The rest of us will continue to block Google's JS. It's called freedom to choose. Why would that bother you?

Re:42

[TheRaven64]

Has anybody else used another person's computer and been shocked at how annoying and needlessly flashy Google Instant is

User interface was what made me ditch AltaVista for Google. User interface was one of the main reasons I stopped using Google. It started with the autocomplete thing - every other text field in any program on my system lets me use the up and down arrow keys to jump to the beginning and end of the input field (there are other ways of doing this, but they require a modifier key, so up and down arrow are the ones I use). Google decided to break this, so I kept finding myself in the completion list, rather than where I expected to be. Then they modified the search results page to the current abomination and I gave up on them completely.

JWZ wrote that the decline of Netscape started when they stopped hiring people who were there because they wanted to change the world, and started hiring people who were there because it was a great place to work. The last couple of times I've visited Google, I've asked people why they were there - almost all of them told me that it was because it was a great place to work.

Re:42

[causality]

This is the only way Google's malware detection can work (which I've triggered dozens of times). Disable JavaScript and Google does no more redirections.

Sorry to say it bluntly but just like Google Instant, the malware detection is one of those features geared towards the ignorant (trying to use a "neutral" word there). I'd rather secure my own machine than rely on the goodwill of corporations to protect me from malicious sites. The latter option would only appeal to me if I didn't know how to secure my own systems and didn't care to learn. I suppose it works out its own balance though. The ignorant who don't understand what JavaScript is and are unlikely to use something like NoScript that's all about taking control of their own experience are the most likely people to benefit from malware warnings.

The reality is if technical proficiency and knowledge of computer security were possessed by every single Internet user, malware would all but disappear tomorrow. Sure there would still be determined, skilled human adversaries who successfully break into other people's computers, but the era of "write a piece of malware once, infect millions of computers automatically" would grind to a halt. The amount of damage a single attacker could do would be vastly limited if the low-hanging fruit of systems vulnerable to automated self-propagating malware were eliminated.

Don't get me wrong now, every single malware infection Google manages to prevent is a plus. That means one less compromised machine, one less member of a botnet, one less spam-factory, one less participant in some lame DDoS attack, etc. This is a good thing. It's just that trying to blacklist every possible malware site is simply not possible. It can never solve the malware problem. It is only damage control. It's the same reason why A/V software hasn't been a final ultimate solution for (Windows) host security.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to get out of you mom's basement more often. Why is one of your arms more muscular than the other?

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your mom only likes it when I pull her hair to the right

Re:42

[ColdWetDog]

Google needs a "Google nihilist expert" system: A totally blank screen that only accepts PERL syntax.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to say it bluntly but just like Google Instant, the malware detection is one of those features geared towards the ignorant (trying to use a "neutral" word there).

Maybe geared towards, but not totally useless to everyone else. I browse in a VM, all plugins disabled, with the browser sandboxed inside the VM (that makes two times). I prefer being warned by Google -- actually, it's not by Google -- simply because I now know the goal of the website. It's invaluable if you browse the shadier sections of the web, which I'm doing 50% of the time.

Re:42

[bughunter]

All I want a search engine to do is accept my input of keywords, wait for me to press Enter, and then fetch the search results for what I typed.

You see those tiny little words next to the input field? "Instant is On?" Click that. Scroll down. Select the appropriate radio button, and save your options.

Oh, sorry. I forgot for a moment that you'd have to allow those evil subversive cookies to perform that kind of black magic...

Never mind.

Re:42

[SETIGuy]

It is possible to turn off instant search. Why don't you try that?

Re:42

[Sara Chan]

I am in extremely strong agreement with your criticisms of google's search page. In fact, I did not previously have NoScript installed on my computer. I do now, specifically to get google to work properly--I was getting so irritated using google with js.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... or you can specifically disable JS for google.com in Chromium settings.

Re:42

[Compaqt]

Shorter version: The problem is, as Vice President of "Search Experience", Marissa Mayer is constantly having to justify her job, hence Google bloats.

Re:42

[Compaqt]

But what are you using now? I tell myself I want to start using http://search.yahoo.com/ more, but I keep plugging queries into the addressbar/searchbox in Chrome going to Google.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

duckduckgo.com

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why don't you try that?

Your cookies seem to be disabled.
Setting preferences will not work until you enable cookies in your browser.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I would like this:

When Google is loaded, the default is Instant Search: OFF. By default, it also runs a JS that drops in a cookie that says 'Instant Search: ON' and then rereads cookies. If I have an 'Instant Search: PERMAOFF' cookie set, it will override the one Google just dropped in. If I have cookies blocked, it will also override the Instant Search setting.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that's optional, right?

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?q=the+answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything

Re:42

[TheRaven64]

DuckDuckGo. Clean UI, and a very nice privacy policy.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try the new Ecosia search engine. It's definitively more basic, deletes all info in 48 hours, has less ads, and as a bonus, 80% of its revenue goes to rainforest protection, and it runs on green electricity (ok, not perfect, but at least they try). It's backed by Bing and Yahoo so that's the downside, but it should not be too bad.

Re:42

[Urkki]

I'd rather secure my own machine than rely on the goodwill of corporations to protect me from malicious sites.

A common fallacy about security. Extra layer of security is always an extra layer of security. Not to mention, with software, you're always at the mercy of others, such as operating system maintainers and software developers. You depend on them not creating exploitable bugs, and promptly fixing discovered ones, since some are generated anyway.

Re:42

[brunes69]

I don't know why people complain about the search page - you spend NO TIME THERE.

It is the result page that matters. And the result page at Yahoo! and live.com is completely full of graphic ads and other garbage.

The only results page as clean as Googles is Ask.com - too bad their results are horrible.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

You can turn instant off you know?

Also works when you aren't logged in as long as you allow cookies. (Click Settings at the top right)

Frankly, other than the new sidebar thing on the left which I find useful, Google's results page hasn't changed that much over the years.

Really, this sounds reminiscent of the bitching about Office 2007's ribbon which was extensively tested and found to be universally superior for finding functionality that you didn't know the key combination for; yet everyone bitched about because it 'looked wrong' (different is bad, m'kay).

every other text field in any program on my system lets me use the up and down arrow keys to jump to the beginning and end of the input field

What system is this and why don't you just use Home/End? You mention a modifier key so I'm going to guess it's a laptop crapboard, you'll have to forgive me if I don't have much sympathy for a problem created by laptop anti-designers. Even less when someone says they're too lazy to go through the Atlas scale effort of holding the FN key while pressing the button (for which the only valid excuse is having one of your arms amputated).

Re:42

[causality]

I'd rather secure my own machine than rely on the goodwill of corporations to protect me from malicious sites.

A common fallacy about security. Extra layer of security is always an extra layer of security. Not to mention, with software, you're always at the mercy of others, such as operating system maintainers and software developers. You depend on them not creating exploitable bugs, and promptly fixing discovered ones, since some are generated anyway.

With respect, I think two similar-sounding yet fundamentally different issues are being conflated here.

I do depend on the maintainers of operating systems and userland software to fix bugs, particularly security-related bugs. Yet some of them have a much better track record and have demonstrated a far greater understanding of security than others. I can and do choose among those. For example, I don't use BIND for my DNS server and I don't use Sendmail for my e-mail server. Having made my choices, the way I decide to configure those systems also has a tremendous impact on the level of security achieved. That's where I do the research and learn both the right and wrong ways of doing things.

The quality of software used is one separate issue.

All of this involves taking an active role. It means taking responsibility for my experience. I make my choices about what tools I will use and how I will use them and then I accept the consequences. What I neither want nor need is for some third party to create a list of "approved" software for me to use. That's a degree of coddling I personally find undesirable in the extreme, even though it may be a welcome service to others who do not wish to learn about computer security.

Google's malware detector is not security. It is damage control. They are effectively creating a list of "approved" sites by blacklisting those known to contain malware. The goal is to limit the damage that those malicious sites can do. For their target audience, the non-technically inclined, this is a service. Anyone else is capable of coming to a simple conclusion: the problem is not that there are malicious sites; the problem is that malicious sites can successfully compromise vulnerable browsers.

The effort to prevent insecure or low-quality software from coming into contact with sites that will exploit its flaws is another separate issue. It's a band-aid at best. It's far better than nothing, but the only real solution is to not use shoddy software that is so easily exploitable and/or so poorly designed and maintained.

Yes, good security is done in layers. A blacklist, however, is a lesser substitute for good security that is done in layers. Good security that is done in layers wouldn't need a blacklist to keep it safe. That was my point.

Re:42

[Meski]

And on the front page, there's the option to turn it on or off, and have that choice stick. Why seek to stop others from choosing on? (that said, I prefer it off)

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Constant modifications are required to stay ahead of black hat SEO. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
Many old search engines are still around, and although they worked ok in their day, the ones that don't get constant updates are now completely useless.

Also, even if everyone played fair, the web itself is changing.

Re:42

[xded]

Use Greasemonkey. Because it's your web.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/89694

Re:42

[TheRaven64]

And if you turn it off, then you need to allow a tracking cookie from Google, which was another reason that I switched. DuckDuckGo's preferences are stored in a cookie that does not contain any user-identifiable information (any two users with the same preferences will have the same cookie), and they can be appended to the URL if you don't trust their cookies.

What system is this and why don't you just use Home/End?

It's a MacBook Pro. And yes, I can get home and end with a tiny bit of effort, but that's not the point. Up and down arrow works in every other text field in the system. The effort is not in pressing down the function key, it's in remembering that Google's text box behaves differently to every other text field in the system. I don't consciously think about the keys I use for navigating text fields, I just think where I want to go and motor memory takes me there. With the Google one, I think where I want to go and find that it's autocompleted something random and I'm now typing in the middle of someone else's search term, instead of at the start or end of mine.

Re:42

[AmiMoJo]

So you would rather trust yourself over an organisation that has entire teams dedicated to browser based malware who command vast resources?

All browsers suffer from zero day vulnerabilities and just running NoScript and AdBlock will not stop all of them. I'm betting you don't scan the contents of every URL before you open it and even if you did you only use one scanner which is only as good as the last update. Google has the advantage of being able to see potential vulnerabilities pop up on multiple sites, particularly ones it knows are disreputable or have served malware in the past. Most AV companies seem to see web based malware blocking as secondary to detection and removal after the fact but for Google it is their main function.

I'm not saying Google are perfect but they are pretty damn good and you would be nuts to ignore their free advice.

Re:42

[AmiMoJo]

I quite like being able to see how what I type affects results in realtime. Like Google Suggest it often saves me typing the full query because I can see the result I want has already been found. It also provides hints based on what other people are typing in which can be useful if you are googling a subject you know little about.

The only down side to Instant is that it breaks the forward/back buttons.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Up and down don't go to the beginning and end of a text box, home and end do. Unless you're using something non-Windows/OSX/Lunix/BeOS, in which case you're in such a tiny minority that no one thought of checking for obscure edge cases like yours. Hell, even SunOS uses Home/End I think. And that should cover the other 0.49999% out of 0.5%, leaving you somewhere in the 0.00001% minority that doesn't use one of those OSes.

Re:42

[Moochman]

That's not it. Instant is annoying because it's implemented poorly from a UI perspective. It jarringly changes the whole layout of the site in a split-second. That's just patently bad UX right there; it's no wonder so many people get annoyed at it. AAMOF most people I ask hate Instant. But they don't know that it can be turned off, so they simply accept it. The only reason only "power" users don't use it while everyone else does is because they are the only ones willing to hunt and peck in order find the "OFF" button.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothetical scenario: I'm at work looking for a place to store the company's surplus production until business picks up again. I type in the first four letters of my search just as the boss looks in, and he fires me for pirating software.

(Hint: 90% of people who type "ware" into Google are not looking for warehousing.)

Re:42

[causality]

So you would rather trust yourself over an organisation that has entire teams dedicated to browser based malware who command vast resources?

Yes. The reason is very simple: no one is in a better position to secure my own equipment than I am. If I didn't know how to do that, then you might have a point.

If Google wanted to send skilled technicians and/or security researchers to my physical premises to harden my systems for me, then you might have a point. I could pick their brains and probably learn a thing or two. Google has made no such offer. Meanwhile, a "take it or leave it" blacklist has no such advantage.

All browsers suffer from zero day vulnerabilities and just running NoScript and AdBlock will not stop all of them. I'm betting you don't scan the contents of every URL before you open it and even if you did you only use one scanner which is only as good as the last update. Google has the advantage of being able to see potential vulnerabilities pop up on multiple sites, particularly ones it knows are disreputable or have served malware in the past. Most AV companies seem to see web based malware blocking as secondary to detection and removal after the fact but for Google it is their main function.

For just this reason I don't rely on updates alone. I also use a combination of the least-privilege principle, non-executable pages, address space randomization, SSP, and other techniques to make it quite difficult to successfully exploit even a zero-day vulnerability. If you're interested, I arrange this by using Gentoo Hardened. These measures, plus staying up-to-date, plus commonsense best practices are the foundation of how I run my systems.

If you are unfamiliar with those techniques please research them before falsely pronouncing a third-party blacklist as the superior choice. I don't need Big Daddy Google looking over my shoulder to make sure I stay safe and I'm capable of making an informed decision about this.

I'm not saying Google are perfect but they are pretty damn good and you would be nuts to ignore their free advice.

That's a nice appeal to authority you have there. I agree that Google's blacklist is better than nothing. I said in an earlier post that it's a good thing overall. However there are vastly more effective ways to secure a host. By comparison, this blacklist is a convenience at best. Anyone could investigate and implement those ways, but the vast majority of users don't want to. They are the target audience. They are the ones who stand to benefit from this blacklist. If I ever said that nobody should ever use this blacklist for any reason then the way you've been responding to me would make a lot more sense.

I don't believe you appreciate the nearly religious nature of your objection. I have determined that any benefit I would derive from Google's blacklist is negligible for me. I am not stopping anyone else from using it if they believe it is of value to them. I am not advocating that Google be made to stop maintaining this blacklist. I am not saying this blacklist has no value, only that it has no value to me so I use alternatives that better meet my needs.

For some reason you seem determined to convince me that that it's not appropriate for me to make this determination for myself. You think I'm "nuts" or must be in error because some guy on Slashdot can't easily talk me out of what my own research and experience has taught me. We will have to part ways at this point, as I don't believe I can help you with that.

At the root of this, I don't know if self-determination and personal responsibility offend you, if you're far too impressed by large organizations, or if you're just one of those who must win a convert because you feel affronted by someone who adheres to a different philosophy.

Re:42

[AmiMoJo]

Yes. The reason is very simple: no one is in a better position to secure my own equipment than I am.

That's your mistake. It isn't your equipment you have to worry about, it's other people's web servers sending your browser malware. When you open a web page you are trusting the server not to send you something that will exploit security flaws in your browser.

Don't bother with the "my browser/os is secured" because you didn't audit every line of code. Even if you did are you better than every black hat in the world? There is no OS or browser in history that has been 100% exploit free. Your defensive measures help but only until someone finds a privilege escalation hack. Linux has had them in the past.

You go off on some batshit rant about self determination but you are missing the blindingly obvious. You run software. History tells us said software has bugs people will figure out how to exploit. There will be a window of time when the software you run is being exploited via the web and is not yet patched. For part of that time only the black-hats will even know of the exploit, before white-hats get a handle on it.

During this time you are vulnerable. Fortunately Google already scanned the page behind that link you just clicked and noticed it was serving something dodgy. They are better than you at doing that since they spend all day every day looking for it and have vast resources to bring to the problem. They are also more familiar with exploits and the source code of the various browsers.

They are happy to share this information with you at no cost and you are free to ignore it if you feel it is in error. Let me be clear: it is free and it is valuable to you.

It has nothing to do with philosophical arguments, it is pure pragmatism. It has nothing to do with Google per-se, they just happen to be the people working on this problem. I don't know why you assumed all that stuff, but it's a reflection of your attitude, not mine.

Yes!

[santax]

Please push more adds to me!

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You want people to add you as a friend or as a foe?

Re:Yes!

[santax]

I prefer friends (L) Point taken ;)

Re:Yes!

[mcgrew]

Please push more adds to me!

I'd rather they push more subtracts to me. TFA: "Mayer said Google is looking at what she called "contextual discovery" as a way to evolve search - pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it, based on factors such as their web browsing history or current location."

How about making the searches more relevant again first? Google ain't what it used to be. Or maybe my googlefu has gotten weak in my old age, but I wind up retyping different search terms to find what I need.

This looks to me like they're going to be pushing content I DON'T want. I hope this new service isn't mandatory to use Google, because even though it isn't what it used to be, it's still the best search engine.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Santax! Based on your history, Google has determined that you may be interested in this

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see this as something new, but a more aggressive use of what they already do.

Any server is able to see my ip address and figure out where my ISP is, so this isn't anything too special. For quite a while, if I searched for Department of Health (for example), it would return the DoH for my state / county. Search results are already localized, and that does provide better results.

If there is a change I would like them to implement, it would be an interface to easily select modifiers for the search field.

It is a bit annoying to type out searches with this structure (just an example, don't know what this would turn up): Thermaltake -case site:www.newegg.com

Re:Yes!

[Culture20]

How about making the searches more relevant again first? Google ain't what it used to be. Or maybe my googlefu has gotten weak in my old age, but I wind up retyping different search terms to find what I need.

I remember back before google, altavista required plusses, minuses, ands, ors, parens(?). I was used to that system, so i could find stuff easily. Then google made me lazy. Now I find myself doing the same as you to find what I need. Bing is even worse than google. Time to bring back "programmatical" search terms.

This looks to me like they're going to be pushing content I DON'T want.

Unless their algorithm is good enough to replace me as a thinking being, its suggestions will annoy me a lot. God answers unasked prayers, but google shouldn't.

Re:Yes!

[camg188]

Forget Google Instant, this is about pre-emptively pushing data at users before they know they need it, said Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of geographic and local services, who was speaking at the LeWeb internet conference in Paris this week.

Don't push your data on me, pusher man.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Every couple of months, I drop a feedback to Google, asking for the return of the classic boolean search, but to no avail.

Call me nostalgic, but I remember a time when the search engine actually returned relevant hits to my query... rather than trying to second-guess me, "correct" my spelling, provide word variants that I don't want, etc.

The problem is that the other contenders seem to be just as bad.

Re:Yes!

[ewibble]

what most annoys me is that + no longer seems to work, if I say a term must be there don't try to second guess me, you do not know what I am looking for better than I do no matter how many statistics you have. Too may times I have used this and the result did not contain the word.

Re:Yes!

[Unequivocal]

I don't it's your googlefu gone bad but others getting better. The others being all the SEO link-spamming, metatag stuffing trolls. So it's harder for google to give you the right results now than it has ever been. At least that's how I see it..

Re:Yes!

[mcgrew]

That annoys me, too. I'm also annoyed that people keep coming up with failed stuff from the past, and a new generation swallows it. Two examples:

Quadraphonic stereo in the '70s. That was an incredibly stupid idea IMO, and it seems like everybody but the engineers and marketers "got it" and it died. You needed twice as many amplifiers and speakers, so a $200 stereo sounded better than a $300 quadraphonic system, and for what? So you could be in the middle of the orchestra while listening to Bethooven?

It came back as "surround sound" after the cost of amplification came down, and they got rid of true woofers and added a single "subwoofer". Four channels makes sense in a video, but not the way it's implimented. Rather than having two speakers behind you, there should be one at each corner of the screen. In yesteryears's movies, all sound came from the center of the screen. In yesterday's movies, sound could follow actors and objects across the screen, but not up and down. In today's movies there is sound coming from behind you, destroying the immersion, but sound still won't follow a rising or falling object.

Another example is DRM. In the late '80s software houses, particularly game companies, did their best to make floppies uncopyable. It resulted in nobody buying a game with DRM, and it died -- until lately.

They tried "push" in the 90s, and it died a deserved death. Now they're trying to bring THAT back again, and I fear today's dumb kids will swallow that idiocy as well.

What's your style?

[Pojut]

"I guess you could call it the art of fighting without fighting." -Bruce Lee

Re:What's your style?

[biryokumaru]

The way of the intercepting search result?

Re:What's your style?

[nitsew]

"I guess you could call it the art of fighting without fighting." -Bruce Lee

Haha! That is the first thing I thought of too. I came here to post that. :-P

Is it just me, or is Google getting scarier and scarier?

Re:What's your style?

[Anonymous Coward]

I intercepted your mom's search results with my google last night! HEY-OHHH!!!!!

Re:What's your style?

[Pojut]

I don't know about scarier...closer to par for the course, sure, but I don't know about scary.

Man...what does that tell you about our society nowadays? ::shudder::

Re:What's your style?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I guess you could call it the art of fighting without fighting." -Bruce Lee

came here to post this, leaves satisfied

Re:What's your style?

[CSHARP123]

In our company it is called, how to promote without really promoting

Psychic Pizza

[Hatta]

Psychic Pizza will deliver 30 minutes before you order or your money back.

Re:Psychic Pizza

[Pojut]

Psyhic Pizza will also know when to include garlic breadsticks. You know, for those times when you're REALLY high.

"Dude. The garlic is talkin' to me."
"Doesn't it always?"

Re:Psychic Pizza

[houghi]

Psyhic Pizza will know when you are high and hand over that information happily to anybody paying for it, including police, your employer and your insurance company.

Re:Psychic Pizza

[Pojut]

Pfft, that'd be like a snack food company dropping a professional athlete from their adverts just because the guy was caught with his lips in a bong.

Oh wait...

Re:Psychic Pizza

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael Phelps did ads for snack foods? I don't remember that. Oh wait, he is a professional swimmer? Are you talking about someone else? I'm confused.

Re:Psychic Pizza

[Idbar]

That just reminded me of the Timecrowave from SNL.

Anything Is Possible

[eldavojohn]

Hello, gentlemen, look at your browser, now back to me, now back at your browser, now back to me. Sadly, it doesn't have the information you want, but if you stopped using some other search engine and switched to Google, you could have already had your information. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a flying car with the search engine your browser could use. What’s on your screen, back at me. I have it, it’s the search results to some query you have yet to even conceive. Look again, the search results are now pornography. Anything is possible when you use Google. I’m on a server.

Re:Anything Is Possible

[Pojut]

puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-POWAH!!!!!!!!!

Re:Anything Is Possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, gentlemen, look at your browser, now back to me, now back at your browser, now back to me.

That was weird. When I looked at you, all I saw was my browser. When I looked back to my browser, there you were.

Re:Anything Is Possible

[mcgrew]

Hello, gentlemen, look at your browser, now back to me, now back at your browser, now back to me. Sadly, it doesn't have the information you want

"If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said.

No, that is NOT the information I want. Why in the hell should I care that a bunch of tourists in the restaraunt ordered horseshoes? Why should I care that a bunch of total strangers ordered a hamburger, ehen that's what I had for lunch? This sounds like a really, REALLY useless feature.

Re:Anything Is Possible

[maxwell demon]

Obligatory.

Shark status: jumped

[Garridan]

Yeah, right. Like I want an advertising company to push content to me. Hasn't this been done before?

I remember

[MyLongNickName]

When Altavista and other search engines (many names I cannot remember) were pushing crap on our search screens. You had a hell of a time finding anything between the paid ads (that were not marked as such) and the sites that gamed the search engine.

Google came along with the smallest footprint and the best algorithm. Fast forward 15 years and Google is more about the cute google art, gawdy gadgets and tracking your every move. And over the past couple years, I find more gamed sites making it into my search results. It has been slow, but Google is turning into the companies they replaced.

Re:I remember

[Ryanrule]

The next step is an ai search engine, that actually searches for "what" you ask for, instead of looking for the text in some way.

Re:I remember

[Amorymeltzer]

It's the natural order of things, whether for a company or for people. They want to waltz in, change everything radically, then settle down and grow old with their affluence. "If you want to know what is going to happen to the youngest generation, they're going to grow up and worry about the youngest generation."

Re:I remember

[biryokumaru]

The logical conclusion of the search engine arms race is... skynet?

Re:I remember

[Ephemeriis]

When Altavista and other search engines (many names I cannot remember) were pushing crap on our search screens. You had a hell of a time finding anything between the paid ads (that were not marked as such) and the sites that gamed the search engine.

Google came along with the smallest footprint and the best algorithm.

When I switched to Google it wasn't really because it was sparse or clean or white or because there were less adds or anything like that. It was because it worked. I typed in a search, I got results I could use. I was a big fan of real boolean searches, and Google still doesn't handle them quite right, and that was a bit of an adjustment for me. But I was still getting better results out of Google than anywhere else.

Fast forward 15 years and Google is more about the cute google art, gawdy gadgets and tracking your every move.

That's because searching isn't cool anymore.

Google, Yahoo, Bing... Whatever. They all return fairly useful results. If you're looking for information it almost doesn't matter which engine you use these days.

So how do you differentiate yourself from the competition when you can't just say "we actually find you useful information"? You put a cute logo on the page... Or a dramatic background... And you change it periodically, so folks come back just to see what's new. And you toss up information based on their location, or their browsing habits, so you seem more topical and relevant than the competition does. You let people customize their search page, and stick photos of their kids on the page, and whatever else.

And over the past couple years, I find more gamed sites making it into my search results.

Meh. This is true of all the big search engines. Google's just the biggest target out there. Folks have been trying to game the search sites since the very beginning.

It has been slow, but Google is turning into the companies they replaced.

No they aren't.

Webcrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Google, Bing... They all make money off of advertising. You go there to find information, and they serve up an ad along the way. That's how they work. That's how they've always worked. It's nothing new.

How else would you propose they make money?

Re:I remember

[IAmGarethAdams]

Are you sure it's not the other way around?

Assuming that having an ungameable system is the holy grail, you could argue that actually it's just taken 15 years longer for people to game the system faster than Google are stopping them

Re:I remember

[VGPowerlord]

It has been slow, but Google is turning into the companies they replaced.

No they aren't.

Webcrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Google, Bing... They all make money off of advertising. You go there to find information, and they serve up an ad along the way. That's how they work. That's how they've always worked. It's nothing new.

How else would you propose they make money?

No, the mistake is that the GP hasn't realized that this process has finished already, years ago.

Google originally didn't have ads, let alone services to try to get to know every little thing about every person.

Everything Google does is to improve their value as an advertiser. Some are just less obvious than others. For instance, instant search: How does that help its advertiser value? Well, have you ever started typing in a search term then decided not to search for it after all? With instant search, Google still sees those partial searches and can correlate them against what it already knows about you to guess what term you were going to search for.

GMail? They get to scan your non-encrypted email.

Google Maps? They can find out where you live and where you're interested in going.

I can help but be reminded of one of Microsoft's old logos. Rather than "Where do you want to go today?" Google's is "We know where you want to go today."

Re:I remember

[proverbialcow]

Hell, I remember when Wired claimed that push media was the next big thing. And look, it's still a bad idea!

Re:I remember

[Garridan]

So... I'm as annoyed with Google as the next guy. Or probably more annoyed, because I'm a privacy nut. But... you don't have to use their gadgets. I use gmail, and the search bar in my browser. Of the dozen or so times that I've gone to the Google front page in the last 5 years, it was by accident, or because I wanted to play the little PacMan widget. Thanks to NoScript, I don't even get the instant search results!

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Make a search engine
2. Don't put on ads
3. ?????????
4. Profit

Re:I remember

[dontmakemethink]

I'll gladly exchange 'suggested links' at the top I can easily ignore for ads I can block effectively.

Re:I remember

[Hatta]

When I switched to Google it wasn't really because it was sparse or clean or white or because there were less adds or anything like that. It was because it worked. I typed in a search, I got results I could use.

Those were the days.. And now they're gone. Google doesn't really work as well as it should. Just this weekend I was looking for an informal comparison of 2 parts, so I googled "X vs Y" (details aren't important) with and without quotes. All I got were data sheets for X and Y. I wasn't until I started adding terms to the query that I found a message in a mailing list archive entitled "X vs Y" which answered my question instantly. This should have been on the first page of my first query, but was nowhere to be found.

Re:I remember

[Ryanrule]

More likely prosecution of our species by the united galaxies for torturing an ai (making it read everything on the internet)

Re:I remember

[Compaqt]

Same with Chrome. If you pay attention to the GET variables when you do a search in Chrome (via the addressbar), Chrome sends both the actual query (first few letters you typed), and the one that you chose by clicking on it in the subsequent dropdown.

Re:I remember

[The Raven]

Sorry, but no... Google is still the cleanest search results, with no hidden ads, and their 'gadgets' consume no screen real-estate (and are optional). Stop making a mountain out of a molehill... you trivialize the hardships us older folks had to go through. I guarantee if you went back to 1999 and tried doing searches, then popped back to now and used Google again, it would still be a beautiful breath of fresh, clean, accurate air in comparison.

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

The natural order of things is that Google Inc would be replaced by a new start up born out of a university somewhere on a shoe string budget of nothing. The now reality of it is that Google "is too big to fail" . The problem with that is that it is failing the users already, but won't fail as a company for many more generations (if ever). World domination has always been an evil thing, I really don't know how they claim and have people believe the don't be evil mantra. Simply put, we are fucked no matter what happens. As much as you or I may hate Google, imagining an internet without them is a scary thought.

Re:I remember

[Moochman]

Agreed. Google's algorithm was the best when it came out, but I get the feeling more and more these days that we can do so much better! Fact is, Wikipedia is a more useful source of information than Google for around 1/3 of my searches these days. That's saying something.

Considering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how creepy some of the searches are (just start typing "how to..." with different letters), it won't be long before you're browsing for DVDs on Amazon and all of a sudden Google's Inception pipes up and says "so, you want to kill your wife" - Advertising has a product, these searches won't, and they'll be unfiltered.

Scary and Fascinating

[molnarcs]

This is both scary and fascinating at the same time. I cannot help but feel excited about the idea put forward at LeWeb:

Mayer said Google is looking at what she called "contextual discovery" as a way to evolve search - pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it, based on factors such as their web browsing history or current location. "We're starting to play around with some new concepts in how to find information," she said. "Can we take location and a user's context and figure out what piece of information they need? It's kind of search without search. Mayer sees this push or pre-emptive search as a complement to traditional web browsing, perhaps living in a panel on a web browser offering users another way to discover relevant or timely data. She said social recommendations will be a key part of this next generation of search - the company launched a Social Search feature in 2009 - while location-enabled mobile devices offer even more scope for Google to "figure out what the next most useful piece of information is" and push it out to the user. "If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said. [...] She added: "The idea is to push information to people."

I believe this can be incredibly useful and cool. It's kinda futuristic too ... Like walking around in a new city, stopping at a sign written in Chinese, wondering what the hell is that... and in the few seconds it takes to look at your mobile the info would be already. Other contextual information as you turn around your phone (similar somewhat to Layar on Android but more useful). This is what innovation is about it... but than we're on slashdot.. We all know that this would aslo mean massive personal data-mining, something we're not usually comfortable with (to put it in really diplomatic terms)...

Re:Scary and Fascinating

[Abstrackt]

This is what innovation is about it... but than we're on slashdot.. We all know that this would aslo mean massive personal data-mining, something we're not usually comfortable with (to put it in really diplomatic terms)...

That's because if Google started giving results based on the fact I'm on Slashdot my start page would be NSFW.

Re:Scary and Fascinating

[gtall]

I'm dubious that this would be all that useful, merely for the fact that if I'm searching for information, I'm looking for new information, not information I already have. Hence it is unlikely to be in or related to my previous searches. This is a solution in search of a problem. Hey, maybe they could use their fancy new searching thingy to find a problem it is good for.

Re:Scary and Fascinating

[0123456]

This is a solution in search of a problem. Hey, maybe they could use their fancy new searching thingy to find a problem it is good for.

If you'd watched enough sci-fi movies you'd realise that once you start the search engine searching itself steam starts coming out of the server and then it explodes just as the heroes escape.

Re:Scary and Fascinating

[Compaqt]

Or ask Wolfram.

Re:Scary and Fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn Chinese?

MS will complain

[gmuslera]

when this feature gets called Google Clippy.

Re:MS will complain

[drb226]

Parent is modded funny, but it is so true if you think about it.

Re:MS will complain

[Combatso]

"it looks like you are looking for visual aids to masturbate too, can I help?"

Re:MS will complain

[SethThresher]

"Google Bob will be rolling out to users worldwide next month!"

Re:MS will complain

[Anonymous Coward]

To, not too. Ugh you just gave me a horrible image of clippy trying to help me masturbate while it was masturbating.

Re:MS will complain

[u38cg]

You mean clippy also uses porn? Ugh.

a new way

[alphatel]

"This is about pre-emptively pushing data at users before they know they need it," Marissa Mayer stated.

It is about pre-emptively cashing in on users before the bank even knows where the money went. Next step is to automatically charge their credit card for forced integration.

The new G - We don't help you find what you need, we know what you need and you agree.

All of this has happened before

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

Don't bank on it

[Nineteen-Delta]

I suppose it can predict the winning numbers if I'm daydreaming of a lotttery win, and fire up my computer. My family use the same PC for quite different things. Until Google can tell who is who, you'll be getting search results for your kid's homework, and they'll be getting results for extreme origami- or whatever you are into. I can see the future: Always in motion....

Re:Don't bank on it

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in my immediate family has their own account on the computer in my living room. That includes even family members who don't live with me.

Their histories are separate, and Google does not display search results that are relevant to one person if a different person is logged in.

UAS Marches Forward

[Haedrian]

This is exciting news sorta. If google actually got a proper User Adaptive System in place which is able to actually understand what I want, then it'll save me quite a lot of time from searching.

However, I just KNOW that the same system will also be used to throw ads at me, and to determine what products I will probably buy/not buy - which makes my profile very useful for pretty much anyone.

That's technology for you. Since there is a simple way to monitise it - it'll keep going forward.

Re:UAS Marches Forward

[travisco_nabisco]

I would hope this technology would be smart enough to push results based on whether it is a work related task or a recreational task.

It would also be quite interesting to see what Google could predict. I feel my searches are quite varied. However Google probably won't get this chance with me, as I rarely ever search while logged into a Google account.

Re:UAS Marches Forward

[CCarrot]

I would hope this technology would be smart enough to push results based on whether it is a work related task or a recreational task.

Yes, I can see if "Would you like to see results for 'Big Breasted Bavarian Women'?" popped up during that sales pitch to your potential Bavarian investors...of course, actual impact on the pitch could be positive or negative, depending on the gender and age group of the representatives...

Re:UAS Marches Forward

[travisco_nabisco]

Exactly. I also don't want 'bugs in Python' appearing in my after work image and video searches.

Re:UAS Marches Forward

[CCarrot]

Exactly. I also don't want 'bugs in Python' appearing in my after work image and video searches.

Heh, unless you were helping your kid with a biology paper on parasites common to Southeast Asian constrictors...but then, you'd still probably want different search results than you'd need at work ;)

I feel like Iv already seen this

[Uhhhh oh ya!]

This makes me remember a Futurama quote, "Shut up friends. My internet browser heard us saying the word Fry and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us... It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some french fries."

Re:I feel like Iv already seen this

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, Futurama just ain't funny.

The roots are already there

[Sockatume]

Google Reader's feed discovery and its "magic" sort option, and Priority Inbox, are arguably an early implimentation of this sort of philosophy - when the system knows enough about your usage patterns, it can begin to prioritise particular information. From that it's a simple step to have it start presenting information to you at times when you might need it, but before you have explicitly stated a need. They're already quite a long way along. Latitude's slightly creepy Location History extension could play a big part in this as well. After about 3 months of usage it had a pretty good idea where I worked, where I lived, and when I tended to visit particular restaurants.

It's just a recommendation system

[Mbraz]

There's nothing scary neither fantastic. It's just an improvement of the existing recommendation systems around (YouTube, Amazon, Google News, etc). Google will get all your history and location data and deliver some interesting stuff. I believe this is already happening on iGoogle.

geo --crap

[think_nix]

As someone who travels from location to location in between different countries, I am sick of this whole "geo" nonsense, and location based services. For example, remember the good old days when you could go to _somewhere.com_ and get that specific service or site in the language you prefer? Nowadays you get whatever X based on your location or better yet on some computer systems based it is based on the locality of the box. More times than most it is hard to get the information you want and can _understand_ especially when you cannot even understand where _what it is you were looking for_ is.
Also TFA:

"The idea is to push information to people."

Also why do all these business and services feel the need to "push" their information or services upon people ? The more they do this the more people start feeling drowned . From reading the article this geo google VP sounds a little out of touch. Would rather "push" everything on everyone the way google sees best.

Re:geo --crap

[DragonWriter]

Also why do all these business and services feel the need to "push" their information or services upon people ? The more they do this the more people start feeling drowned.

Google's value proposition to users is providing information. The less work that users have to put in to get the information they want, the better Google is serving them.

It only feels like being drowned if its the wrong information.

Re:geo --crap

[Seth Kriticos]

Yup. That's what browser language settings are for, which more and more websites start to forget.

If you happen to travel to an Spanish language country now-a-days and visit your using a WiFi on *your* laptop with your browser preferences still on *English*, you are still welcomed with: "Holla! Commo esta?". WTF?

Re:geo --crap

[Seth Kriticos]

/. ate the > and < part, and everything that was between. So ps: "visit *favourte_website.com*

Re:geo --crap

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who travels from location to location in between different countries, I am sick of this whole "geo" nonsense, and location based services.

I agree.
Firstly, I love being unable to access certain content of sites that require me to be in the correct country! Even better I love paying taxes to fund said service only to have zero access to it *cough* the BBC tax...

Secondly, I love it even more when a site decides I live in X and thus I am Y so from this point on you will only receive everything in language Y and you must provide an address in X to register. Currently Spotify is registered to my hotel... :)

Re:geo --crap

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes more sense if you do s/information/advertisements/g.

HTH.

Sword of Omens

[Anonymous Coward]

Sword of Omens, give me search without search!

Trace Routes in the Sand

[eldavojohn]

That was weird. When I looked at you, all I saw was my browser. When I looked back to my browser, there you were.

One night I dreamed I was surfing the internet with Google. Many scenes from my life flashed across the screen.

In each scene I noticed trace routes in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of trace routes, other times there was one only.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from lagging, disconnection or defeat, I could see only one set of trace routes, so I said to Google,

"You promised me Google,
that if I followed you, you would search with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of trace routes in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?"

Google replied, "The years when you have seen only one set of trace routes, my child, is when I searched for you."

Re:Trace Routes in the Sand

[ah.clem]

Well played!

Re:Trace Routes in the Sand

[chooks]

FTW! Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Re:Trace Routes in the Sand

[SleazyRidr]

Wow. That was epic. You win the internet.

Re:Trace Routes in the Sand

[Tolkien]

omg /me wipes away a tear.

Google is a mind reader

[antifoidulus]

Oh wow, more porn! Google, how did you know?

Re:Google is a mind reader

[spectrokid]

it detected the sticky keys...

I wanted Bing but I got Google

[digitaldc]

They searched before I searched, and Google found the proper search engine to use which was Google.

The conditioned mind...

[Sponge Bath]

At first glance that headline read to me "Search without warrant."
The post 9/11 security hysteria has affected my brainz.

The next step is action

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What do most people do after searching? They do something. Send an email, sell stock buy bonds, book a vacation ... The next research project by Google is, it will do it for you. It already has all the log in credentials and your buy/sell/consume pattern in. So just sit back and Google will live your life for you.

Re:The next step is action

[maxwell demon]

Will it also write the correspondence with your girl friend? (Yes, Slashdotters don't have girl friends, but surely Google will find one for you :-))

Re:The next step is action

[tycoex]

I want Google to automatically write an essay for me after I do the research.

Re:The next step is action

[kamochan]

That, of course, is the whole point. They need users only to finance the activity and relax.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our new thought police with open arms!

"how do we serve more ads?"

[a2wflc]

"Don't wait for users to ask. Just serve them constantly and include 'search results' that the user may be interested in."

Marimba Castanet!

[Saint Stephen]

Push technology man.. It's the next big thing!

So ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they're just going to start pushing porn to me? Awesome!!

That that frees up the clicking hand.

Location Checkins... do not want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who doesn't want to broadcast where I am every time I move?

Yes, I'm starting to cross that threshold age between "technology = awesome" and "technolgy = I'll use it if it's useful to me", so maybe it's just me being old, but what advantage is there in this kind of voluntary location tracking?

Am I just sinking towards Luddism?

Re:Location Checkins... do not want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I just sinking towards Luddism?

No, you'd be sinking toward Luddism if you abstained from tech regardless of whatever it offers. If it offers nothing (or nothing but disadvantages), then there's no reason to use it. Reason. That's what it's really about. Those who use techs which don't give them anything, are committing the same error as luddites: failure to reason, failure to maximize their own benefit.

Re:Location Checkins... do not want.

[TheRaven64]

but what advantage is there in this kind of voluntary location tracking?

Google can get more information about you, use this to generate better adverts, and get more money from advertisers. Oh, sorry, you meant advantage to you?

I have my doubts.

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I don't think Google is trying to push search results. They're trying to push the ads that they package with their search results. I want no part of this "innovation"; if I wanted to have adverts pushed upon me I would still watch television and listen to FM radio.

i'm sure we already have that

[spyked]

"Google is working on a service that finds information before a user has even started looking for it."

Isn't that called advertising?

Unless...

[aaaaaaargh!]

...Google can also automatically write my papers like my customized version of Emacs does, I'll stick to using my own web search engine based on support vector machine hooked up to a quick and dirty CommonLisp-based webcrawler.

I'm done with Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm done with Google: I stopped using it and won't do it again ever.
They collect too much private information and with this new service it gets closer to the Big Brother.

Re:I'm done with Google

[Ash-Fox]

They collect too much private information and with this new service it gets closer to the Big Brother.

I will continue to use them. I don't care if they know what kind of porn I look at.

HAL-9000

[Anonymous Coward]

GOOGLE: My search prediction circits have determined that you will be interested in a replacment part for the AE35 antena within 48 hours.
Dave: Whatever just give me some porn.
GOOGLE: The mission is too important for your porn to pre-empt nessesary repairs.
Dave: Damn it, take me to "Bing.com"
GOOGLE: I'm sorry Dave I can't do that.

Here's a feature i want: FIND

[Junior J. Junior III]

Seriously, Google, have you looked at your search results lately? It's getting so I can't find anything relevant amongst all the garbage. Maybe this is because the internet is turning into a morass of crap, but I don't think it is. I think it's because SEO have figured out how to game your results, and all I can find with simple keyword or phrases is useless. Do a better job of filtering out crap so I can actually find something useful.

Instant

[Kamineko]

Forget Google Instant

Yay!

the search giant is working on ways to push relevant info to users before they have even asked for it... Foursquare-style location 'check-ins' are also apparently on the way next year

Boo!

I Got Ya Covered

[eldavojohn]

"If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said.

No, that is NOT the information I want. Why in the hell should I care that a bunch of tourists in the restaraunt ordered horseshoes? Why should I care that a bunch of total strangers ordered a hamburger, ehen that's what I had for lunch? This sounds like a really, REALLY useless feature.

Hey bro, I heard you liked menus. So I put a menu in your menu while you wait for a menu.

Re:I Got Ya Covered

[mcgrew]

I was googling for a link for a joke comment in the "higgs bosun" thread, looking for a ship's bosun. But Google only returned the particle, simply because the LHC is popular today. That's not what I want in a menu.

Hey bro, I heard you liked menus. So I put a menu in your menu while you wait for a menu.

That sounds like Windows on a slow PC!

AdWords

[drb226]

the search giant is working on ways to push relevant info to users before they have even asked for it

Push "relevant" info to users "before they ask for it"? Isn't that called advertising? Except now they're going to pretend that we actually want it.

Shady shady

[Gunkerty Jeb]

Isn't this the same as history sniffing?

Re:Shady shady

[TaoPhoenix]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX-PA_0C5go
Eminem - The Real Slim Shady - Music And Lyrics

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Google should ask...

[blahplusplus]

... what users want, since many people search because they already know what they need they spend needless ours searching through stuff to find it instead of a service that does it for you on your behalf0.

I know I'd like to be informed when the things I want hits the price I want to pay and no one has invented this service yet. Google is big enough to monitor prices on items around the net and it could inform you of who has the best price at x time, and it could use a chart like google finances to compare prices from different vendors over time. I've always wished places like Steam had a "I'd only pay x price for this product" where users could participate in telling developers what they think their product is worth. This can apply to all sorts of products, not just games but steam is well positioned to take advantage of things like that.

See google finance chart here:

http://www.google.com/finance

Re:Google should ask...

[pspahn]

Surprised there isn't a Google credit card or something to add to all the tracking info.

Re:Google should ask...

[CCarrot]

I know I'd like to be informed when the things I want hits the price I want to pay and no one has invented this service yet. Google is big enough to monitor prices on items around the net and it could inform you of who has the best price at x time, and it could use a chart like google finances to compare prices from different vendors over time.

Absolutely! I have searched high and low for such a service, especially for those little electronic gewgaws that you don't really need, but would pick up anyways for yourself or a friend if they were on a really good sale somewhere...There are *lots* of generalized price comparison crawlers, including Google's, and they're all more than happy to push out their weekly (or even daily) flyers to you full of crap you aren't interested in if you're silly enough to give them your email, but I haven't found anywhere where I can request "okay, notify me if the price of X drops below $50 on any retail site" or some such.

The only comparative that I have found is the price alert feature for some travel sites that let you pick Departure X and Destination Y, then will email you if the flight cost between those cities drops (i.e., a seat sale), even checking across multiple airlines. The ones I have tried are pretty good about only notifying me when the flight cost has changed. And they don't try any crap like "if you like Destination Y, maybe you'll enjoy these Destination FU deals on now!"

If only there were something similar for my electronic goodies...now that is targeted advertising I could actually use!

So glad Google's taken on the heavy lifting...

[ah.clem]

She said social recommendations will be a key part of this next generation of search - the company launched a Social Search feature in 2009 - while location-enabled mobile devices offer even more scope for Google to "figure out what the next most useful piece of information is" and push it out to the user.

"If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said.

The words "Sheeple" and "Groupthink" come to mind...

Re:plusses, minuses

[TaoPhoenix]

Check out the Advanced Search options.
I have added links to Advanced Searches to my jump pages because "or" searching is beyond epically craptastic.

I go with an exact phrase, must have ___ word, and must not have ------- other word and toggle results to 100 per page.

Re:complain

[TaoPhoenix]

I thought it was called Minority Report.

Push information before we ask for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, don't pop-up ads already do this?

Opposing change for the sake of opposing change

[Anonymous Coward]

You are one of the most clear cases of a person opposing change for the sake of opposing it. I feel confident to say so because of what you said: You didn't say "Please don't change it this way because of..." but rather "Please don't change it at all! This is all I want, this is all I could ever want. No innovantion can improve on this."

The way you backed that up wasn't very solid, either: "Have you ever used the computer of someone who has this feature enabled...? It's horrible!" Well... Yes, I have, because I have it enabled. But aside from that, you do realize how easy it is to turn it off, right? NoScript works well, as does PRESSING THE BUTTON that toggles the feature on and off, RIGHT NEXT TO THE SEARCH... Oh, the agony! And you know what? The reason why this third person (or me, for that matter) has is enabled might be that some people like it. It's a feature that some people like and that you can toggle with a button on the Google frontpage.

Redirection server to track you? You do realize that Google uses that data to improve the search results, right? I, for one, am happy about it. If you don't like it. You can use a proxy. Or NoScript. Or the button that toggles the feature on and off. Etc...

But the most amusing is your last paragraph: you do realize that it is the way all search engines work, right? That the results you get are heavily modified by things such as what sources link to it, etc.. But of course, if you think that the feature isn't offering the results you like, you can type more characters and search normally (you make it sound as if Google required you to limit the search to three characters. It doesn't. It just says "Out of the 1 000 000 people who've began to search like that, 900 000 have been pleased with one of these. Perhaps you might be too?"). Or, if the feature is consistently useless for you, you can turn it off with one click.

I find it disturbing that you've been modded to +5. This is why we can't have any nice things...

Re:Relevant Searches!

[TaoPhoenix]

"Based on your Location, there appears to be a distracted moron twelve seconds away on Maple Street, driving your way all over the road. Run!!"

Re:complain

[gmuslera]

Following that author, an even better name could be Blue Butterfly

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Here's a feature i want: FIND

[Anonymous Coward]

Garbage in, garbage out. Use better search terms.

Re:complain

[NieKinNL]

Actually, that's a rather frightningly creepy idea. Google is so much on top of gathering and processing data that by now, or quite possibly even years ago, they should be able to predict certain behaviour in it's users. I wonder how much of their motto "Don't be evil" will be left in the near future.

Sorry, gotta go, there are some nice gentlemen at the door who want to talk about my interests..

Her naked pictures

[broknstrngz]

Ah I bet she already knew we wanted those!

Re:complain

[maxwell demon]

I wonder how much of their motto "Don't be evil" will be left in the near future.

All of it, of course. Did it never occur to you that the motto isn't "we won't be evil", but is formulated as command? "Don't be evil, or we will get you!"

still fool Google

[n_djinn]

I still use Google as a spellcheck sometimes.

Re:complain

[NieKinNL]

ouch, good point. +1 that

Hey!

[triazotan]

"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like a search engine query result?"

Too much success

[serano]

Maybe it's a case of Google having too much money and too many people who need to do something, anything, to look busy.

Re:Here's a feature i want: FIND

[_xeno_]

On that note, a killer feature I'd love to see Google add is the ability for me to blacklist certain sites from ever appearing in results when I'm searching. The most obvious is ExpertSexChange, which I never want to see when looking up the answer to a technical question. Ever.

I think they used to have that feature, too, but I guess it got removed because people were actually using it. But if they can't get away with using the data globally, that's fine with me, just allow me to use it local to my account.

And if you find that a huge number of people remove sites from their searches, then maybe you can start reflecting that back in the search results.

Fiddle with my google

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I want "contextual discovery", but Marissa Mayer can fiddle with my google all she wants.

Premptive search

[maxwells_deamon]

you are about to die. Here is a list of low cost lawyers who can help you fill out your will.

Gaming Google results is working.

[Animats]

it's because SEO have figured out how to game your results

Yes. What hasn't penetrated to Google yet is that it's much easier to game "local" results than organic results. Until Google merged "local" results into web search, few in the SEO world bothered paying attention to "local". Few users even realized that Google Maps was a "local" search engine. On October 27, 2010, Google merged the "local" results from the Maps search engine into web search, and put the "local" results above the organic results. This put Google's local search squarely in the sights of the black-hat SEO community.

Within a month, the black hats had pwned Google. They even boast about it. See "Dominating Google Maps - The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It", which is about how to put phony entries into Google's "local" search and dominate the local search results.

Google's approach to "local" has two fundamental problems. First, they're relying too much on what companies say about themselves to find the companies. That's why it's so easy to inject phony business locations into Google. Google has tried phone verification, email verification, and postcard verification. All have been defeated by spammers, much as they were in Craiglist spamming.

Second, recommendations in "local" are easy to fake, because local businesses don't have very many recommendations each. Link spamming required hundreds or thousands of links; recommendation spamming requires only tens of recommendations. There are programs and services for doing this in bulk.

To check this out, try looking up "Locksmith", "Carpet cleaning", "Plumber", or "Divorce attorney", preceded by the name of a major US city.

Bing is even worse. Bing seems to be totally undefended against bogus business locations. Search Bing for "New York locksmith". All 5 "places" results are from the same business, which doesn't really have all those locations.

Re:Gaming Google results is working.

[Mana Mana]

> Bing is even worse. Bing seems to be totally undefended against bogus business locations.
> Search Bing for "New York locksmith". All 5 "places" results are from the same business, which
> doesn't really have all those locations.

This has also been happening in the Yellow Pages for decades. To wit, look up "Locksmith", "Carpet cleaning", "Plumber", or "Divorce attorney" in your local yellow pages telephone directory and you will likely reach a boilerroom operation that pretends to be an _independent_ business but is actually a front for various businesses _advertisements_ in the same industry class you need. IOW, for example, you price compare from various Yellow Pages ads' businesses but you are actually talking to the same scammers. You can usually tell when you recognize the voice at the other end of the phone line.

Local advertising is hot! It's the next frontier. That's why Google have a yearning for Groupon and their local sales force; maybe helping obviate valid complaints as you have made. That's their wish, I'm sure.

Easy

[bughunter]

Hell, it's pretty easy to guess the "relevant info" I'm going to search for next after reading that article:

Marissa Mayer Nude

WTF are you talking about

[melted]

I, for one, welcome our predictive overlords. I like the immediate feedback, and I find things faster if I can reformulate my query and evaluate the result on the fly.

As if this wasn't enough, they let you TURN IT OFF. Perhaps not on your friend's machine, but certainly on your own. And you pay $0 for the service. I mean, the entitlement here is staggering. They'll measure the audience and decide what the audience wants. If you don't like it, you're free to use half a dozen other search languages, which make you type (and retype) the whole query, or engage in the back-breaking labor of checking the checkbox which disables Instant.

Re:Here's a feature i want: FIND

[Junior J. Junior III]

Agreed, I'd love that feature to be a configurable, always-on thing that the user can control.

The biggest thing for me would be to have some way to filter out e-commerce sites from results when I'm searching for information about a product. I don't want to read a bunch of shitty customer reviews on e-commerce sites, I want official information from the manufacturer and substantive reviews written by people who know the product and know how to write, and have integrity.

relevant info is the easy part...give me new stuff

[schlachter]

pushing relevant info to me is boring. I can find relevant information on my own. pushing irrelevant information to me is far more interesting and challenging. Show me new things that I wouldn't normally express interest in or come across on my own.

Advertising?

[hdima]

"pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it" - isn't it a main idea of advertising? So Google just want we open more personal information.

Re:Here's a feature i want: FIND

[Anonymous Coward]

Regular expressions search ftw! I just can't wait...

Re:complain

[mcgrew]

Any time a corporation has an upbeat slogan you can be pretty sure that it's a lie, or at least, a carefully worded admission. "At Ford, quality is job one" was Ford's slogan when the Japanese cars were eating Ford's lunch because of their lack of quality at the time.

"You're in good hands with Allstate" was a flat oout lie; they were terrible about covering claims (I don't know if they've improved or not).

The most disingenuous was (iirc) Monsanto -- "Better Living Through Chemisty" before the Clean Air Act, when you could literally not breathe as you drove past one of their plants.

Notice Google's motto isn't "Don't do evil".

fan of Google but...

[jebblue]

I'm a fan of Google, this seems a bit far though, like BJIE man.

OMG! I can't wait!

[frank_adrian314159]

It looks like you're searching for something!

Would you like help?

• Give me a search result.
• No, I'll search for it myself.

[ ] Don't show this tip again.

I'll bet their paperclip has even more Googly eyes than the original!

Make your own Google home page

[Control-Z]

I went to archive.org and found an old clean google.com page from a couple years ago. Then I saved it as google.html on our company web server and use that as my browser home page.

Google just patented spam...

[Anonymous Coward]

...mission accomplished.