How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
On the sad state of Google search today:
How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town?
Link tags: sea
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Undersea Cables by Rishi Sunak [PDF]
Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.
Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
A principled approach to evolving choice and control for web content
This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.
But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.
Google’s AI Hype Circle
Google has a serious AI problem. That problem isn’t “how to integrate AI into Google products?” That problem is “how to exclude AI-generated nonsense from Google products?”
Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over - The Verge
AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.
This is a really good oral history of how AMP soured Google’s reputation.
Full disclosure: I’m briefly cited:
“When it suited them, it was open-source,” says Jeremy Keith, a web developer and a former member of AMP’s advisory council. “But whenever there were any questions about direction and control… it was Google’s.”
As an aside, this article contains a perfect description of the company cultures of Facebook, Apple, and Google:
“You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”
Spot. On.
Dark Patterns: We Asked 500+ People How Brands Deceive Them
User research into deceptive design patterns:
Despite our technological advancement and understanding of human nature, it’s still common to see deception in digital products. To understand digital deception (and better define it), we surveyed 536 people to measure and discuss people’s understanding of this matter.
“the secret list of websites” - Chris Coyier
Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.
I concur with Chris’s assessment:
I just think it’s fuckin’ rude.
Site Search in Arc Browser — For Your Own Site - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I can now have
adactio.comon speed dial for search — a valid use case indeed.
😊
Funnily enough, I tend to use tags more often than my own site search. I type adactio.com/tags/… followed by whatever I think past me would’ve used. So my browser’s address bar is kind of a sitesearch interface already.
The search element | scottohara.me
I’ve already add the search element to thesession.org, but while browser support is still rolling out, I’m being extra verbose:
<search role="search">
...
</search>Brought to you by the department of redunancy department.
I’ll remove the ARIA role once browsers are all on board. As Scott says:
Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.
ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem
It doesn’t bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.
Yes! Like I said:
Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.
Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse
A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
Programming Portals
A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes
The Customer Onboarding Handbook [PDF]
A free PDF with five articles:
- The Brand Experience Gap by Emma Parnell
- Ongoing Onboarding: Taking Customers from First Use to Product Mastery by Chris How
- Just Add ICE: 3 Ways to Make Your Customer Experience More Meaningful by Candi Williams
- Effectively Researching and Using Customer Journey Maps by Lauren Isaacson
- Using and Abusing Surveys in Customer Onboarding by Caroline Jarrett
Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!
Improving the information architecture of the Smart Pension member app | Design and tech | Smart – retirement, savings and financial wellbeing
Here’s a really excellent, clearly-written case study that unfortunately includes this accurate observation:
In recent years the practice of information architecture has fallen out of fashion, which is a shame as you can’t design something successfully without it. If a user can’t find a feature, it’s game over - the feature may as well not exist as far as they’re concerned.
I also like this insight:
Burger menus are effective… at hiding things.
What happened when we disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing?
Shockingly little. So you should try it, too.
Open Lecture at CIID: “Keeping up with the Kardashevians” – Petafloptimism
A terrfic presentation from Matt Jones (with the best talk title ever). Pace layers, seamful design, solarpunk, and more.
The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet · Yiqin Fu
Imagine a world without hyperlinks or search:
Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:
- It doesn’t allow any external links;
- Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
- You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Search engine indexing is key to content discovery in the knowledge creation domain, but in a mobile-first world, it is extremely difficult to pull content across the walled gardens, whether or not there is a profit incentive to do so.
Again, the issue here is not censorship. Had China relaxed its speech restrictions, a search start-up would’ve faced the same level of resistance from content platforms when trying to index their content, and content platforms would’ve been equally reluctant to create their own search engines, as they could serve ads and profit without a functional search engine.
Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale
I found this to be thoroughly engrossing. An articulate composition, you might say.
I couldn’t help thinking of J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Drowned Giant.