> Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results.
I resonate with this so much. It offends me in the worst way - it makes me waste my time. Not only when I search something, but on other places too! "Will the content change before I click or not? I don't know, so I better wait a few seconds". Even if a page is not an offender of doing this, I've already been conditioned into waiting.
It's frustrating and it's infuriating. We have ever more powerful computers, and yet interfacing with them feels slower and slower.
Things like this made Google good stewards of the web.
Do Google engineers not read their own design docs anymore? It almost feels as if the move was intentionally sinister and engineered as a sadistic A/B test.
People spend so much time making their pages look, work and feel better but then turn around and add a shitty, badly designed cookie consent that ruins that whole experience.
Google Search’s addition of that dynamically-appearing widget two years ago was the primary reason I switched to DuckDuckGo.
The least they can do is push it to a second column on desktop and to the bottom on mobile.
Load page. Click -> oops, some element pushed the content down, sorry, wrong link. Gotta go back. Like you, now I give pages time to cool down. It drives me nuts.
The worst offender in my mind are async suggestions loaded on keypress on mobile. Maybe I've got 8% battery left so the CPU got throttled, maybe there's additional network latency right now - whatever it is, too often the result is that the rug gets pulled from under my finger just as I am about to tap on an item in the list.
They have a whole site dedicated to this. I tried asking the authors why Google does it themselves, but no answer that time.
Of course, by only punishing the peasants for CLS, they can offer AMP as an easy alternative, or at the very least, streamline most of the internet to their liking without playing by those same rules themselves.
It’s disgusting.
Can we do something to disable that feature? I'll try disabling JavaScript, or maybe there's a browser extension that does that.
EDIT: Disabling JavaScript stops it but the search is also much slower for me, and there's an additional redirect. The layout is also quite different than what I am used to. Someone posted a uBlock filter here:
Otherwise, it's a great alternative and thanks for the shout out!
task description: some times users click a url after 2 seconds because it is the one they want, unfortunately this causes a serious decrease in exposure to customer ads, therefore it would be beneficial if we detect a user moving too quickly to click something unprofitable for us if we move the links in such a way as to increase profitable actions and decrease overall negative retention rates.
on edit: that's right, I'm so paranoid I think that song is about me.
But 90% of the time I tab over to Google and hit enter instead of letting it go through DDG because I already know Google will give me the technical resource I need.
DuckDuckGo also suffers from a readability problem. The text is less crisp, more rounded, the URL is switched with the page title and makes scanning URLs harder, which is my default. Little things like this keep me trapped.
Why do we listen to them about web standards again?
I mean we all agree Material looks like shit, right?
I dislike the redesign as well, but this paragraph is very much a "Hacker News Moment" :)
It's very frustrating when you are in a hury and you click on the wrong address because just a moment ago they updated the drop down list
Spotify and twitter do it as well. (Reading an interesting tweet while the timeline refreshes, and then it's gone; it might even be some kind of non-followed dynamically pushed content that you don't easily find again).
That is closely related with the slightly less obnoxious practice of repositioning things after an explicit reload or re-entry (but this is still annoying): In spotify, if you click on a playlist, return to home view, the order of playlists in the home view has now been "updated".
Sounds like A&B testing measuring which gives you more ad revenue and zero biological brain cell activity involved.
It's not necessarily anything new for Google though. I remember for years on YouTube there would be a giant square ad to the right of YouTube videos that would pop in after a few seconds and push the recommended videos all down, so you'd frequently go to click a video and suddenly an ad pops under your cursor and you click that instead
This appears to be the norm, not the exception, in most mobile pages I reluctantly visit. I don't understand how mobile website developers can stand to work on their own sites--I give up in frustration after about 10 seconds.
I don't know how you haven't encountered that yet until recently, but that quirk has existed for all of the ~15 years I've been using Google.
* I use the iPhone app
Sometime in the last few years, Google started doing that very thing in their search results. After 1-3 seconds, sometimes a widget pops up which pushes all the search results down. I have countless times gone to click a URL after 2 seconds of searching and had it suddenly move and end up on a different website.
It's incredibly disconcerting. Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results.
Anyone who was in charge at Google and had good design sense is long gone, and an empty-headed cargo cult remains.
P.S. I organize my bookmarks bar by favicon color without labels. Gmail was fourth, after the EFF, Youtube, and SMBC. Now I will be kicking gmail to the end of the bar with the rest of the multi-colored icons which can't be sorted and remain indistinguishable from each other. I may be a small data point but Google just effectively killed their premium placement in my bookmarks which will lead to checking my web mail less frequently.