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Comment by hombre_fatal

6 years ago

They took urls away and then added this: https://i.imgur.com/RI4xxgs.png

For example, searched "hierarchy" and it'll show "en.wikipedia.org > wiki > hierarchy" above the wikipedia search result.

> This change can't possibly be beneficial to users.

You're right if the url/domain isn't even shown at all. But I can think of a few benefits of showing the domain as it currently does, like to avoid phishing. It also basically parses the url and interprets it for less-technical users which is something that more-technical users are already doing when they read the url.

I don't think it's so bad as a default if there's a config option for displaying the full url for more technical users, or the necessary data available to at least write a browser extension.

4 comments

hombre_fatal

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dessant  6 years ago

Multiple versions are being tested. The one I've seen does not contain the domain, not even in a tokenized form.

It looked like this: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-testing-search...

  • hombre_fatal  6 years ago

    Yeah, the iteration I'm being served is definitely an upgrade over that. The one shown in your link is what I had previously, so it seems that mine is a refinement of it and a middle ground that I don't think is so bad.

    • boomlinde  6 years ago

      I don't see the issue with showing both an URL and a tokenized representation, outside Google's seeming motive to "kill the URL". In both versions, information that would be immediately available in the URL is potentially left out, which can't possibly help prevent phishing unless Google goes out of their way to actually verify that websites are what they say they are.

      It's also hard to trust Google engineering to get something like this right after the Chrome "trivial subdomain" stripping debacle(https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881694).