News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by alienreborn on Monday September 09, 2019 @03:49PM (#20921720)
> 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks

I get why this is included in Anti Trust but I love this feature. Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by onion2k on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @01:59AM (#20925440)
Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.

You're misinterpreting that report. All it tells us is that Google returns results the user doesn't want to click on more than half the time. We can't determine whether that's for positive reasons (eg info in the results page) or negative reasons (eg the results were garbage) based on the fact there wasn't a click.

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by FreakyT on Monday September 09, 2019 @04:29PM (#20922111)
Agreed -- my favorite example of this is lyrics. Most lyrics sites are horrible, ad-filled messes, and I for one can't wait for Google to finally eliminate them from existence.
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by freehunter on Monday September 09, 2019 @05:14PM (#20922555)
Genius.com is such a good lyrics site (good... not great) and it kills me when I search for lyrics and it's not on the first page of results. I don't know why, but I always have to add +genius to my searches to get it to show up over all the trash sites.
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by amaccuish on Monday September 09, 2019 @06:08PM (#20923016)
I second that. So good and clean that I've atually contributed myself.

I personally hate Google including say Wikipedia snippets. Quite often I want to read more of the article, and the link is small and at the bottom of the box, often requiring you to click and arrow to reveal the full box.

If they value Wikipedia and Genius/MusicMatch so much, they should make it much clearer where they got their content from.

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by pgodzin on Monday September 09, 2019 @10:55PM (#20924684)
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by ratww on Monday September 09, 2019 @11:40PM (#20924848)
Lyrics websites are just spam at this point.

Whenever you search for song names they take the first two pages and interesting stuff such as news and interviews are scattered around the rest of the results.

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by aviraldg on Monday September 09, 2019 @04:26PM (#20922077)
Solution: allow these companies to bid for the spot. Like they're doing in the EU for the choice of default search engine in Chrome.

Allow power users to pick a default, so we don't have to suffer through terrible third party content and ads.

Disabling this functionality will be a net negative for the end user.

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by Multicomp on Monday September 09, 2019 @04:06PM (#20921892)
I agree that's a useful feature, but that seems orthogonal as to whether or not it is anticompetitive.
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by buboard on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:37PM (#20923704)
i would also love to scrape google s search queries and results pages and make a website showing them. i m sure my users would love it.
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by alienreborn on Monday September 09, 2019 @09:13PM (#20924239)
Sorry but some one else already did that before you (http://startpage.com).
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by buboard on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @02:50AM (#20925677)
> Startpage exclusively uses results from Google, which the company pays Google for
Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by buboard on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @03:01AM (#20925736)
or they cant find the link to click. seriously, they are tiny and greyed out and the SERP content fills the view already