Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for a second:
1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension.
2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want.
3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.
4. How about an image search that... actually returns the URL of the raw image?
Here's a dead simple use case that is just unnecessarily frustrating. As a user, I want a high res picture of a buffalo. So:
a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page contains thumbnails of buffalos.
b. I click the first result, it's tagged with "nationalgeographic.com" so it's probably gonna be good. Instead of the image, I get another page, but with a slightly bigger picture than a thumbnail. When you over over it, it says "3,072 x 3,072" but the image itself is clearly not that resolution.
c. So I click that image, and it opens a new goddamn tab of nationalgeographic.com's web site, with another picture, still not the promised 3,072 x 3,072! WTF!? When I try scrolling down to look for the raw image somewhere I'm hit with an E-mail signup-wall. Good grief!
d. Little did I know, if at step b. I instead right-clicked on the image and selected "Open Image in a new tab", I'd have gotten the image I was looking for. Thanks, Google, for hiding the 99.9% use case that people want to do.
The actual user experience should have been:
a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page contains thumbnails of buffalos next to clickable .jpg links. The End.
Why couldn't they litigate it? As far as I know it wasn't a court decision but a settlement, which means no legal precedent has been set and it wasn't determined whether their original behavior was actually illegal.
It's amazing to me that Pinterest hasn't been sued for this, despite having much more blatant examples of copyright infringement that don't link back to the source.
You can thank Getty images(1) for that :/ I personally think Getty and most stock image results are pure spam and google should have just ditched them altogether and kept the original search. Now google image search is also shit and full of stock photo spam:
Well, in the age of "creators" I'm sure there are countless of people who would be willing to post pictures of buffalo "for free" if they believed they had a chance of having their work actually make it to the top of the search results
For step d, why is that Google's fault? Your browser already has a means to view an individual image, why should Google reimplement something that a right-click can just already do?
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but I happily pay for Youtube premium and it's truly an amazing experience compared to the ad-ridden non-usable free Youtube. If Google created a similar Google premium where it had such features and no pesky ads I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
yeah, but then your just encouraging them to make the free version a bad as is acceptable, like YouTube, and possibility create classes like on commercial airlines. you want the world divided into classes?
We already have classes, and some people do pay premium for better service and quality happily.
A world without that choice, where everyone's experience is equally bad ... how sad that would be. Just ask your average east-European soviet-era survivor.
I'm about to do this as well. Must be amazing experience. First when I stareted youtube on my FireStick it was one commercial 5 seconds. Then 2 comms 5 sec. Then 2 each 1:30 seconds, but I can "skip ads" after 5 sec. Now its 2, sometimes 3, each 2:50 (I seen ad for some Christian church had 28 minutes!) and sometimes no "skip ads" button. The YT+ cost $18 per month... alot, until you realize huge freedom of not wasting 15 to 30 minutes a day when you want to do some research and watch some science-focused videos.
An easy way to personally blacklist (and a bare minimum on/off switch if you need to toggle it) would make me so damn happy.
Why should I be forced to look at a page full of purple links when searching for some specific programming topic? It feels like there's a bunch of potentially-fake developer blogs that copy/paste from Azure documentation, without adding anything novel.
1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension.
2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want.
3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.