From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.
So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)? But you could still call that censorship or social engineering even then. Isn't getting rid of spam also "using their power?"
Without heavy-duty ranking and spam prevention, would you even use it at all?
So yeah, they have a lot of power, they're getting leaned on by other powerful forces, and we don't need to agree with their choices. But just like a newspaper has to decide on something for its front page (and leave other stuff out), a search engine's gotta rank things.
For me, I want pirate sites when searching for piracy and I never want click farm.
Google used to have a simple mission- organize the world information. This means helping you find what you’re looking for. Link farms didn’t do this, they made it harder to find the real thing. If I’m looking for a document and Google knows I want it, and knows the document’s location and doesn’t show it to me, that’s bad. I don’t really care if Google morally doesn’t like piracy, or makes more money by blocking piracy, or whatever. It’s their site, they can do what they like.
But this is why they are worse at their job than they used to be.
One of the reasons I never liked AOL is because their search was like an index through the yellow pages and didn’t use what made the internet so awesome (all the world can connect to each other) and rather was about what was most advantageous for AOL and their advertisers buying keywords.
What happens when these large companies start making people unhappy just because they have the wrong politics? What happens when groups of people within companies like Google start looking the other way when people start to manipulate/SEO page rankings to bury facts and promote their own interpretations of documented facts and science?
It's already happened.
Wouldn't these people need to be specifically from the search team, and not Google in general (which would have almost no control over search)
That's really the main leverage studios have over Google right now: "either remove the stuff we tell you or you'll no longer get access to the content you want from us."
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that MPAA's board seat on the W3C was sponsored by Google (and Netflix, maybe Microsoft, and a few others).
And now let the down-votes rain in.
This coincided with Android getting a much more restrictive permission regarding removable media (under the label media storage permissions), that made it impossible for non-system apps to write to removable storage (sd cards, usb sticks, etc).
EDIT: Evidently you can right-click and view image. I thought that wouldn't get me to the original image since the image as presented in search is smaller in resolution than what Google says the image really is. Either way, in DDG the image actually links to the damn image and not to the site where the image supposedly maybe appears on.
If DDG / Bing become big enough, they too will be forced to stop their practice.
https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...
The case with linking is far from settled.
Legal or not, I don't care though. But I do look forward to highly anonymized p2p networks with useful services and software we can rely on by the time the lawmakers have made the internet useless.
Having said that, I think Goggle is just hiding behind the lawsuit threats.
I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.
Maybe your complaint is really that their appeals process is too opaque or difficult. There I agree, but I don't fault them for stopping short of perfect on their AI classifiers.
It seems like you would to test with this to assess quality.
In older versions of google, one could quote a full error message of almost any type that came up on your computer and get a very good page describing that that error meant. Now that is not the case. Maybe the internet has degraded and this is no longer possible, but I would imagine it would really help out google coders if they had a system of searching the web for error messages that worked (and quite a competitive advantage if it only worked for them).
Not many, it's probably the highest guarded secret in the company as far as products go.
Instead, first left-click the thumbnail to open the larger image preview. Then right-click the large preview image and select "open image in new tab". You will get the full image.
If anyone has an example where this doesn't work, I'd be curious to see it. It works every time for me.
Works only for some sites. If the large preview is a stretched thumbnail of that picture, then "open image in new tab" will not get you the full image but the thumbnail.
That happens when the large picture hasn't yet loaded. If you wait it usually will load.