Chrome Tests Removing the URL of Google's Search Results Page (bleepingcomputer.com) 84
"Google has started testing a feature that will display the search query in the Chrome address bar rather than the actual page's URL when performing searches on Google," reports Bleeping Computer:
This experimental feature is called "Query in Omnibox" and has been available as a flag in Google Chrome since Chrome 71, but is disabled by default. In a test being conducted by Google, this feature is being enabled for some users and will cause the search keyword to be displayed in the browser's address bar, or Omnibox, instead of the URL that you normally see...
When this feature is not enabled, Google will display the URL of the search in the Omnibox as you would expect. This allows you to not only properly identify the site you are on, but also to easily share the search with another user.
It's been 18 months since Wired reported that Google "wants to kill the URL.
This week now finds Bleeping Computer arguing that instead of removing URLs in one fell swoop, Google "is gradually eroding the various elements of a URL until there is nothing left."
When this feature is not enabled, Google will display the URL of the search in the Omnibox as you would expect. This allows you to not only properly identify the site you are on, but also to easily share the search with another user.
It's been 18 months since Wired reported that Google "wants to kill the URL.
This week now finds Bleeping Computer arguing that instead of removing URLs in one fell swoop, Google "is gradually eroding the various elements of a URL until there is nothing left."
Consider the source (Score:5, Interesting)
I can understand why google would like to fade into the background and become an invisible, unimpeachable source of information.
Can someone explain why consumers would want this?
Re: Consider the source (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only because MS is inept. Given the right management, MS could easily be Google.
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Only because MS is inept. Given the right management, MS could easily be Google.
Microsoft is no longer clearly inept. Azure, whilst terrible in many ways, and designed for awful lock in in others, is well designed to satisfy some commercial needs and is succeeding in the market in a way that recent MS systems such as Windows Mobile completely failed to. They also get much more internal data than Google from inside many people's computers where Google only sees people public internet activity. Do not yet write them off as a source of true evil.
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You think Google intends to extinguish the platform that all their applications run on? Kill off their big sources of income - ads, G Suite etc?
In favour of what, Android? So abandon the desktop entirely, throw away all that work they have done to be more corporate friendly (look at how well Chrome integrates with corp management tools for example) and just hope that businesses switch to tablets?
Re: Consider the source (Score:2)
Google certainly has little chance of replacing the web with Android(aside from the fact that pushing web into apps would be the biggest gift to Apple in history; a substantial percentage of âappsâ(TM) are pretty much just a
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There seem to be some myths about AMP. The page doesn't have to be hosted by Google, for example.
It's true that it being so close to Google is an issue, but all the major web browser companies are doing the same thing. Apple has Apple News which is substantially the same as AMP, and has made changes to Safari that impose similar rules on web developers of all web sites (not just Apple News compatible ones). Mozilla too.
But all this is just part of the way the web has always been. Before Google it was Yahoo
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No I think they are trying to dumb it down. How far they intend to go I have no idea but if it is anything like making it the new AOL then I'll pass. AOL had many of it's clueless users hanging on (and paying $20/month) thinking that AOL was the internet or required.
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Google has embraced and extended the web. For their next trick, they'll be extinguishing it.
Hyperbole much? Google has made a change to their browser. Alternate browsers continue to work as they always did. Car analogy: Ford *introduces trike*. Slashdot: "Ford killed the 4 wheeled car industry!"
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Presumably if you change the default search provider it works the same way for other search engines. The same as search suggestions do.
Re:Consider the source (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone explain why consumers would want this?
Why would the wants of the consumer be relevant? After all we live in a time of browser oligopolies. We only have 3 browser engines, all of which are so complex they need large corporations to maintain them. All of those corporations have, in the past, acted against the interests of their users multiple times.
Perhaps in the big view this could actually be good. The web is increasingly failing. There is more and more tracking and malware in it. Everyone who can now runs Javascript blockers, often not because of advertisements themselves, but because they do not want to take part in idiotic real-time bidding wars to select the ad. Perhaps we should work on a successor to the web. Something that is much simpler and avoids the biggest problems of it.
Re:Consider the source (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps we should work on a successor to the web. Something that is much simpler and avoids the biggest problems of it.
We should. Then it will become popular as an alternative. Then corps will see people are moving to it and taking their eyeballs and wallets with them and will see how they can get their ads in there too. Just in small subtle ways at first but as it's a lot less intrusive than web v1 people will continue to move over to v2. As more and more do, advertising will be more and more prevalent until we get back to where we are now and someone is saying we need v3.
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Well advertisement is not really the problem. The problem is how advertisements are done today, and that's by making the client execute code thus creating deliberate security holes. Also since it's extremely flexible, it's very hard to regulate.
Imagine for a moment, we had something like Teletext or Bildschirmtext/Prestel/Minitel. There your screen is divided into 40x24 character cells. The terminals are unable to execute any code from the publishers. There you simply can make simple regulations, for exampl
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Okay, let's start by identifying the problems. The big ones that come to mind are:
- Not enough control over content, e.g. ad blocking is a constant battle
- Privacy must be enforced client side
- Javascript is a steaming pile of poo
- Some robust system of nano transactions (say 5 cents) is required so that sites can get paid
What else needs fixing?
Re:Consider the source (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't use google for anything.
Actually, you do, heavily. You stopped using user-facing apps and thus stopped providing some of your personal info to Google. If you were to fully block Google, though, you'd run into the same difficulties that forced Kashmir Hill to turn most of it back on:
I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything [gizmodo.com]
Google is too omnipresent to be avoided. It's death by a thousand cuts: even if you somehow dodged 900 of those, the other 100 would still kill you.
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I suspect someone like RMS is
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She did it the dumb way though. Like she says it's too much work to export all her documents, because apparently she doesn't know about Google Takeout.
She also blocked Google's servers which broke other apps like Uber which use Google for mapping, and then complained about it. So she needs to decide if she really wants to stop using all Google services completely which means also not using their APIs and any apps which use them, or if she still wants to use Uber for some reason even though they are doing fa
Re: Consider the source (Score:1)
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Can someone explain why consumers would want this?
Simple: I sometimes want to send a search result to somebody, Being able to click in the address bar and get a nice clean URL instead of having to start editing a list of ampersands is much better.
eg: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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It's only for search. It makes sense there because the address bar is also used for searching.
For other sites they aren't going to do this, it's just search.
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Remove some more information... more encryption stays with one brand and they ads...
Re:Consider the source (Score:4, Interesting)
For other sites they aren't going to do this
For now, you mean. The end goal seems to be having the page title or site name in the omnibox. I don't think they'll prevent you from seeing and copying the URL if you want, but it's probably going to require clicking the icon to the left of the omnibox and then some option there to open a window showing the URL. And then we'll have add-ons in the Chrome Web Store offering "easier" methods to see / edit / copy / etc. the URL which only a handful of people will ever use. As for everyone else, Chrome, and by extension Google, will be the web.
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Google wouldn't be the first to do that, Apple would.
The current system is broken. We tried verified certificates, we tried highlighting the domain in the URL, none of it worked to stop phishing attacks and decades after they became commonplace most people still don't understand URLs. In fact many are not human readable, they are full of data intended for machines only.
Often URLs don't work well with bookmarks either. Search for some flights and try to bookmark the results, and your bookmark probably won't
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So some sites are not using persistent URLs, and the solution isn't to fix the sites, it's to invent something other than a URL to do what a URL is supposed to do in the first place? How long until your really-a-URL thing becomes just as useless? The what do you do? Wrap it up in another layer, because this time, it
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Doesn't have to be all new. If you have a way to make URLs work better then by all means tell us.
The two major goals are to make them easier to understand and to integrate trust like certificates were supposed to.
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Re: Consider the source (Score:2)
Honestly, whatâ(TM)s weird about this is that it doesnâ(TM)t even seem to suit Googleâ(TM)s interest: sure, they obviously want to keep Pagerank super valuable; and make throwing questions at google the de-facto mechanism for web navigation; but that seems like something best served
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This is a good point because malware makers would love that the URL is hidden.
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I can understand why google would like to fade into the background and become an invisible, unimpeachable source of information. Can someone explain why consumers would want this?
Look no farther than religion. Many people crave an invisible authority to make them feel secure. But organized religion has gained a bad rep in many circles, and even the rubes are starting to be a bit doubtful about all that magical nonsense in the Bible. I'm sure lots of them would be only too happy for Google to be 'Magic Skydaddy 2.0' - invisible, omnipresent, authoritative, and available.
As you pointed out, what grasping large corp wouldn't want to be that Skydaddy? And Google has a better chance than
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Can someone explain why consumers would want this?
You're the product, not the consumer.
Shooing everyone into their walled garden (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's no URL, you cannot use it without telling Google what you did. No links without the "share" button, no bookmarks without Google noticing. You don't even know when you look at the original content of a site or a Google cache / CDN version of it.
The Google Play Store for webpages. *unable to display on rooted device
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You seem to have completely misunderstood what is happening here.
There is a URL. TFA actually has a screenshot of the mechanism by which you can view it (right click, select "show URL"). All they have done is hide the google.com URL when you are on that site doing a search, and replaced it with the search terms.
Which makes sense since a lot of searches are started from the address bar. It hasn't been just a URL bar since Chrome 1.0.
I expect this works if you change the default search provider too, same as s
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We've seen this (anti-)pattern before. It's not unique to Google.
Step 1) We hid the menu that enabled users to toggle Javascript.
Step 2) The subset of people who have telemetry on are too stupid to use about:config or to write/install an extension to toggle it.
Step 3) We re
Safari already does this (Score:3)
On iOS at least. And it does it for DuckDuckGo as well. Probably all the built in search engine selections. In some ways I like it as it’s easier than trying to decode a URL with +s and & codes in it. It only shows that way for your configured search engine, not if you visit another.
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In some ways I like it as it’s easier than trying to decode a URL with +s and & codes in it.
If only there was an input box on the search results page to let you see what you typed.
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If only there was an input box on the search results page to let you see what you typed.
Are you saying if only someone could waste valuable screen real estate? I get what you're saying, but these days with the "omni bars" or whatever each browser calls them where search is unified there's little point in displaying a search bar in the results screen anymore. It stands to reason that showing the search query rather than the results bar is the logical next step.
No url? I go elsewhere (Score:2)
https and security (Score:2)
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Just trust the browser. (Score:2)
And Google.
Users are too stupid to let them parse URLs manually, automation is the key buzzword of the future.
I don't use Google for search (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is all Bing anyways.
Like every usable non-Google search engine I can think of, DDG and Qwant rely heavily on Bing. They use other sources, but most of the times, you get Bing results.
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Hell I've started to use Bing. Google is damn near worthless with the results. Lately the top results for things are YouTube videos. I'm not sitting through a a fucking 10 minute video in what would normally be 30 seconds of reading.
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I recommend everyone abandom Google as well if they're going to be like this.
Abandon what? Change search engine because a company changed a browsing app? There's a lot of good reasons to use Duck Duck Go rather than Google, but claiming this is one of them makes you look like some crazy activist and unfortunately masks the legitimate reasons for switching search engine.
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So do I, but I wished DDG had better search results like Google's. :(
The only way to the web is through Google (Score:5, Interesting)
If nobody remembers URLs any more then the only way to find anything on the web is to search for it. Does some big company have a search engine handy ?
Then even better, simply remove the URL altogether, so the search engine _must_ be used.
They did the same with mail. Instead of folders, they do everyone a favour by organizing their messages "by conversation" and "by context".
Of course, the fact that they serve context-based ads and that keeping the messages organized by context saves then a lot of CPU cycles needed to ransack the folders to build a context had no influence in this decision.
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I don't follow your mail analogy at all. I use local mail clients off my own postfix/dovecot combo and the client still (optionally) sorts by conversation or assigns to folders or what have you.
Good for you - but you're missing the point. Even most of the nerds I know can't be bothered with setting up their own mail servers. And for most of those non-nerds out there, setting up a mail client is at least as much of a pain as setting up a server is for those of us nerds who don't do it for a living. Google only cares about capturing and owning the non-nerds - we nerds are a voiceless rounding error.
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What's the URL for Google?
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Email is a poor analogy.
A better analogy would be file systems. Just try to find the actual path of a file. You almost never see it on Android, and I don't know if it is publicly available at all on iOS. And a lot of media players only access content via database, even on desktop OSes like Windows, MacOS and Linux.
And it will defang the internet archive as well (Score:2)
Great... why repeat history when you can change it as you wish?
Obi Wan Kenobi (with Jedi wave): This isn't the info you're looking for. Try this instead.
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Obi Wan Kenobi (with Jedi wave): This isn't the info you're looking for. Try this instead.
Brilliant! This perfectly describes my experience with Google Search. :(
Hard time understanding (Score:4, Interesting)
How is it that in a lot of cases of large corporations becoming more and more obsolete, the corporations themselves are the main driving factor?
Is this like a law in sociology that defines that after reaching some critical mass, cancerous behavior will set in and start destroying the company from the inside?
Having to go to Google's second page of search results happens so frequently now that I consider it a part of the norm. Imagine how much more time is wasted if I don't even see the source URL anymore.
At that point, Bing actually does look like the better alternative, believe it or not.
My main question is, can DuckDuckGo get around this?
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Okay, I may have misunderstood what this is about. In fact, I'm pretty sure I still don't understand what exactly this is doing.
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Okay, I may have misunderstood what this is about. In fact, I'm pretty sure I still don't understand what exactly this is doing.
Instead of the address bar above the search results displaying, for example: "google.com/search?q=hello+world&oq=hello+world&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3703j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8", it will just have the search terms you typed -- "hello world" in the the previous example. They're not removing the URLs from the search results.
Simple reason (Score:4, Informative)
The one place to find and reference all the other places -- and track all the clicks to those places.
Why is chrome so widespread ? (Score:2)
Is it thou ? i'm using firefox since i can't remember when so i can't compare but my bet is that there isn't much difference in speed between chrome and firefox. only influence.
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I switched to Chrome a good while ago because it offered in page language translation. At the time Firefox was getting slow and was still only capable of a single thread. Then Firefox gave us the Australis interface which was a ripoff of Chrome visually. I tried Palemoon for a while but again it was still clunky and slow Firefox underneath. Eventually I tried Chrome and it was faster and a single tab crashing wouldn't bring down the whole thing. Thought about going back some years later but Firefox was stil
Horrible and dangerous. Can't trust Google. (Score:3, Insightful)
switch (Score:2)
people used to abandon IE for much less, the stuff that Chrome is doing is crazy, but most keep on using it anyway.
iOS does this today (Score:2)
Search for anything in the URL field and you'll get the Google results for it with the URL field just displaying your search criteria
Even if you tap on the field, you'll only be able to edit your search criteria. The only way to get the actual URL is to use the share sheet
I'll be honest, it's not bothered me to date - although I appreciate that it might do for other people.
Doesn't this just help the malware purveyors? (Score:3)
When FireFox removed their status bar I found an addon to put it back.. I religiously hover over links and look at sources before clicking..
I have also even gone into FireFox settings to tell it not to hide the protocol.. I want to know the full URL every time.
I only use Chrome as a browser when I have some content that my heavily locked down FireFox (NoScript, FlashBlock, Ublock Origin, etc) just does not want to play nice with .. AND when I trust the site and even then I'm wary of the fact that even trusted sites can sometimes carry malicious ads... but this seems like a very dumb idea.. we should have MORE transparency., not less. .users need to be consciously aware of the sources they're clicking on and do some... critical.. thinking.. Oh crap, who am I kidding? we're doomed.
I'll stick with PaleMoon (FireFox fork that keeps the pre-Chromificationh interface of FireFox) and my addons, thanks... and hope that there will always be an option to avoid getting into yet another walled garden.
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Please keep in mind that browsers allow sites to do very deceptive things with URLs.
Hovering over a "link" in a Google search result will indeed display the URL which you'll ultimately arrive at if you click it, but that "link" won't take you directly where it says it will. (Just use your browser's DOM inspector to verify this.) Your request WILL pass through Google first.
Chrome (Score:2)
Right, that is why they do not care! it is the huddled masses yearning to be lead by the nose that they want. Or the 99.999% of internet users world wide..
Just my 2 cents
Why is this so hard? (Score:2)
Why is product design, and more specifically, UIX design so damn difficult? Give a company long enough and they'll allow their idiot designers to destroy their product.
I just don't get it.
I don't think that's what they're saying... (Score:2)
Currently, if you type search terms into chrome and hit enter, the browser will then display the Google URL of the search result page in the address bar (presuming Chrome is configured to use Google as its default search engine)...that is, your search terms will no longer be in the address bar.
Personally, I would like this change...it's not changing or hiding the URLs of the search results, but rather showing me what I searched for at a never-moving top of the screen. This has nothing to do with hiding who
Of all the reasons to hate/fear Google... (Score:1)
Google may do some things that should worry us, but to me this doesn't qualify as even a little bit evil.
I don't see any problem with using the address bar in this way. You already type the search there, and the browser forwards it to your preferred search engine. Just about every browser already does this. So why is it so crazy to keep the original search text where you originally typed it? It seems like a cleaner UX to me. People can be pretty dumb, but I don't think anybody who would be thrown off by thi
Boiling frog (Score:3)
I really hate staged rollouts. It's bad enough that companies are slowly crippling features over time so the changes are less noticeable, but now staged rollouts introduce a new problem. One person complains that a feature isn't working and asks for help. Everyone else insists they "don't have that problem". Now the person asking for help looks like a whiny troublemaker that is just making shit up. To hell with "better quality". It's all marketing and psychological warfare to help minimize backlash.