Google Is Testing Autoplay Videos Directly In Search Results (thenextweb.com) 126
For a select group of individuals, Google has enabled autoplay videos in Search. "We are constantly experimenting with ways to improve the search experience for our users, but have no plans to announce [the feature] at this time," a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have similar features that were introduced fairly recently. If you find automatic videos to be a nuisance, now is the time to let Google know how you feel about this "feature."
Alternative headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternative headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Alternative headline (Score:5, Insightful)
yep. kill it with fire. autoplaying *anything* is annoying as all get out.
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more like Google is aggressively perpetuating fraudulent advertising statistics to sell to advertisers.
Re: Alternative headline (Score:4, Insightful)
EspeciaÅly when at work.
And it's pretty common to search for stuff when at work.
Autoplay video are a pox. (Score:2)
So, in general,
- Uninstall, or better, never install flash.
- If you must install flash, ensure it's set to require permission to run.
This should stop flash being used to load video.
Then one method to stop HTML5 video, in Firefox and it's derivatives:
- about:config, then
- search for "autoplay". Until you land on "media.autoplay.enabled". Then toggle to false.
This stops videos in their tracks.
Or use a good plug-in to stop this.
But yeah, I won't be using google for search if this is a thing.
Autoplay video must
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Well, the only exception is when I go to a YouTube URL of my choosing. But that stupid "auto-play next video" is annoying when I happen to view a video that's part of a playlist.
The basic problem, for videos and anything else, is always: don't make choices for the user.
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That'll cost them dearly.
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I don't want auto play videos (my addons wouldn't allow it anyhow). I don't want auto play dvds, I turn that crap off.
I don't know why anyone thinks people do, or should, want that. People are just lazy.
Re:Alternative headline (Score:4, Informative)
I don't want auto play videos (my addons wouldn't allow it anyhow). I don't want auto play dvds, I turn that crap off.
I don't know why anyone thinks people do, or should, want that. People are just lazy.
Google appears to have forgotten how and why they toppled altavista and yahoo.
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While Google's sparsity was an obvious advantage in the days of modems, slow connection speeds wasn't the only advantage.
It does look like Google's forgotten most of the things that made Google great in the beginning. The quality of their search results has been falling consistently for years now and they keep adding extra cruft to their pages.
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Having a high speed connection means the auto-playing video starts annoying you instantly
do no evil? (Score:2)
I thought this was like the company mantra?
As far as web browsing goes, aren't autoplaying videos" the de-facto definition of evil?? THE most despised advertisement ploy that marketing has been able to devise?
How on earth do they think this is a good idea? (or are they just trolling us with this idea?)
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Google gave up on "don't be evil" a rather long time ago.
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No they did not. They simply removed the first six characters.
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Or "Google is wasting people's monthly data quotas without asking them".
Google copying Microsoft? (Score:2)
Re:Google copying Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
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MS sucks. Google has become worse. Yeah, the old Google is dead and gone. Been that way for awhile. The inline news was awful as you already said. Even turned off, Chrome still bogs down compared to the version before news was implemented.
They bombed on the Photos app update 1-2 years ago. The new app still doesn't work right.
Inline searching sucks rocks.
Search results are also piss poor given the constant revisions. Old searches pinpointed detailed, unique information right away. Now it's all popul
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I just installed this addon [mozilla.org] and set it to pick firefox os for news.google.com. Seems to flawlessly give the old news page.
--
Happy happy oh my friend.
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Worse than that, Google not-News will send you crap advertorials as breaking news, really crap ones and it can be a real pain to uninstall on Android. Definately a big do not install on Google News and thats to the big shit at Alphabet, Google major advertiser censored and package news, will only get worse.
When they screw with news, you only give them one chance, get it badly wrong and drop them and never ever go back. News is meant to be there in the interests of society, not as propaganda, not as marketi
In other news... (Score:1)
Bing marketshare sees unexpected 10000% increase.
About that (Score:5, Insightful)
"We are constantly experimenting with ways to improve the search experience for our users"
Then why the hell are you using autoplay videos?
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There are numerous companies that I won't do business with, although I wouldn't call that a "boycott", exactly, as I'm not trying to make the companies behave any differently.
So, no, I don't tell them. Why bother? I don't personally care if they improve unless I have no option but to do business with them (I'm looking at you, Comcast), and they'll ignore me anyway.
Re:About that (Score:5, Insightful)
As my physics teacher used to say: if you know the result beforehand it's not an experiment - it's a demonstration.
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Someone sounds a bit bitter
Re: Sounds like a great idea (Score:1)
Why would you want to work for an advertising company anyway? Unless your only other option is tobacco...
First they screw up news, now the search... (Score:4, Interesting)
I disable video in the browser... replaced with click to play, but I would rather not wait until the video download completes.
MSN is my current substitute for Google News, anyone find anything else?
Re: First they screw up news, now the search... (Score:1)
Yeah I use this site called slashdot. They had autoplay ads and pissed everyone off for a little while. Hopefully they won't do that again.
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I just installed this addon [mozilla.org] and set it to pick firefox os for news.google.com. Seems to flawlessly give the old news page.
--
I struggled with destiny up on the ledge, and gasped when, defeated, he slipped off the edge.
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Thanks! That worked... until they get around to checking for firefox os. I had chased a few other similar options, but the google kept catching up to what I was using.
Funny thing... on my phone, I keep checking the box to see the desktop site. Haha!
What is needed is a hardware mute button. (Score:2)
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step 1. buy cheap headphones
step 2. cut both cables off at the plug
step 3. enjoy looking like the cool dude whose smartphone still has an antenna.
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My Samsung tablet still plays an alert through the speakers when I get an email and have headphones in, so...
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step 1. buy cheap headphones
step 2. cut both cables off at the plug
step 3. enjoy looking like the cool dude whose smartphone still has an antenna.
Why do you think they are removing that plug?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You'd make it illegal to show you the Carfax (Score:2)
There would need to be more exceptions than that, or your proposal would end up taking everything related to cars off the web, such as automobile price comparison sites, automobile parts e-commerce sites, do-it-yourself automobile repair reference sites, and automobile insurance claim history sites ("Show me the Carfax").
what a coincidence (Score:2, Funny)
For about a year I've been testing not using any google product for any reason.
Pretty happy with results so far.
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Congratulations! (Score:1)
Google has finally figured out how to tank its most profitable division. I know that I certainly won't be using Google if this pull off this bullshit.
Configure your browser to stop it (Score:5, Informative)
In Firefox (about:config), setting “media.autoplay.enabled” to “false” normally cures the problem. Obviously, it’ll affect all sites, including those where autoplay is largely expected (for example, YouTube), but it’s easy to get used to it.
Re:Configure your browser to stop it (Score:5, Informative)
For that (completely valid) use case, Firefox has “media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground” (set it to “true”). Of course, that’s no longer necessary if you disabled autoplay entirely with “media.autoplay.enabled”, which affects both foreground and background tabs, and which you might like better.
I mentioned YouTube in particular because, in my experience, when autoplay (“media.autoplay.enabled”) is disabled, the YouTube player appears to be started but seeking, and requires clicking twice on the “play” button (once to pause, and once more to really start the video), which is a bit befuddling the first time. It’s only a glitch, though, and I still prefer that rather than having videos start in foreground tabs for all sites.
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Is there a way to have it not buffer the videos like on YouTube?
You don't need to configure your browser (Score:2)
What the article fails to mention is that they also added a toggle to turn off autoplay.
So, yeah, the feature is stupid, but you can turn it off if it offends you.
Source: http://www.androidpolice.com/2... [androidpolice.com]
Websites should pay users when anything autoplays (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless I choose to start the download, it's not your bandwidth, I am paying for it not you, so I should have the choice of if I want to use it. Unless you want to pay for my internet..
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Then get a browser that enforces a total file size quota per page view, or install or make an add-on to do so in your existing browser.
Netflix too (Score:3)
People still use Google for search? (Score:1)
Seriously, I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and feel funny when I use a browser that still uses google.
if I want to search for something on amazon:
!amazon some product
if I want to search for a general term
!wikipedia general term
If I am desperate I man type in:
!google something
but usually that would not give more information.
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!g is shorter than !google.
!b is bing if you ever need it.
I also use !gi (google images) and !gm (google maps) regularly.
It's Google .vs. Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's why I'm using the High Sierra beta on this machine.
It works well--although it failed tis morning, autoplaying on the first foxnews page I loaded.
Foxnews.com is also the only place I've found with an option on it's web player to turn autoplay off (at least without logging in). However, it seems to reset itself to "on" every few weeks, which it had done (and then safari failed to block it, even though it was set to "never autoplay")
or the most part, thought, it works (I hadn't used inn's website for y
Design by committee strikes again. (Score:3, Insightful)
a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have similar features that were introduced fairly recently
So what if they have ? This just screams of "me tooooooo!" and is not a valid reason to do something.
Rule #1 of embedded videos, NEVER EVER autoplay unless that video is the main content of the page. Ignoring that just pisses off your users.
We've all been there, followed a link to an interesting page and started reading it. After a few seconds there's an annoying voice waffling on (and it's always one of two people that do the voice overs.. a manically depressed male who couldn't give a toss what he's reading, or a hyperactive female who sounds like she's just drunk a gallon of Red Bull) about something completely irrelevant.
So now you're frantically scrolling around the page trying to find the damn video amongst all the other flashing animated adverts to try and stop it so you can get back to the content you were part way through.
Come on Google, you want to sell advert space, so why give viewers yet another reason to install an ad blocker ?
To improve the search experience (Score:5, Insightful)
How can I disable all autoplaying videos? (Score:3)
I'd really like advice on this. I absolutely never want a video to autoplay. Period. NoScript seems to block most of them, but occasional sites still get through. Are there other tools I should look at?
In Firefox... (Score:3)
In Firefox (in “about:config”):
- set “media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground” to “true” to disable autoplay in background tabs (until you switch to them).
- set “media.autoplay.enabled” to “false” to disable autoplay in all circumstances (see my comment earlier about a small glitch in YouTube).
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set up a raspberry pi with pi-hole, and use that for your DNS server.
That's fine at home, but what on cellular or on public hotspots?
Dear Google (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you've already got an implemation planned?
Thank you for being so responsive!
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I left Google during the days of second party link farms. This would be if I'd google for say "Barney Rubble". The top of the results would come back with links like "Best deals on Barney Rubble" and "Find all your Barney Rubble needs here! The first page and half of the second page was completely useless.
I guess that's been cleared up, but I see no reason to go back.
What you all are missing.. (Score:1)
Is that the average non-slashdotter thinks that video autoplay is normal and there is no remedy or drawbacks (turning off the option in Facebook that is on by default has helped quite a few acquaintances for example). Also what most Slashdotters don't realize is that 1 video autoplay in the advertising world is a chargeable action onto their customers, who happily pay for video views.
In short, this is an industry-wide scam that all of the big players are doing and no one is calling out.
@Google (Score:2)
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Stupid Idea (Score:2)
Imagine how that's going to play out at your office when you innocently google something that turns up a Not Safe for Work video.
Our office has our browsers pretty locked down, so we'd probably get a warning message up front, but I'm sure that's not the case at many businesses.
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Doesn't everyone keep their work machines muted anyway?
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Muted or not, if you happen to accidentally put an "x" in front of hamster and get videos from that site, you're likely to get a call from HR.
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slashdot is wise (Score:1)
Racism, Hate, Bigotry, Terrorism, Auto-Play Video (Score:2)
Feature request for auto-play videos (Score:2)
Great, I love auto-play videos! But do you know what I love more? When the video I'm watching is suddenly interrupted by an interstitial in the middle of a consonant, just as the story becomes interesting. Don't forget that feature.
I made the right choice! (Score:2)
I've moved to using DDG entirely, to the point where where typing it is just muscle memory now.
I still can't quite get on board with saying I "duck" things, though.
search experience (Score:1)