What's your reaction to changes in the Google search results page?

Underwhelmed.

Haven’t even noticed it; However I can live without it as I fail to see how their tracking my browsing habits/history aids me.

I can’t say that I’ve noticed the items you mention, @dappled_leaves (I guess that means I don’t care); but overall, I seem to have a lot of trouble with the new interface. Hard to describe, exactly, but I’ve noticed that I might type a string of characters in the search field, realize I need to correct something, start the process of removing characters with the destructive backspace, and all hell breaks loose. My screen freezes for what seems an eternity; and then I might start getting some really odd “hits” on the results page.

I chalk all this up to the continued gathering of intel by Big Brother (that would be Google, of course), and go on my merry way. I’m underwhelmed and ubersuspicious.

Fluther does the same. They track what questions you visit and when. A few years ago Andrew posted the % of questions we visited. I was at something like clicking on 65% of the questions asked.

I thought it was unnecessary and slightly creepy.

Handy.

I haven’t noticed it. Maybe because I have web history turned off in my Google account.

https://www.google.com/history/

I don’t care. I have a lot of pages I visit every day and not all are that “good” but I don’t really care if google is interested in what I do. Not to mention I use more than one search engine ^^

www.kartoo.com is one of my favourites ^^

Perhaps it’s in beta and not being shown to everyone. I don’t see what you describe. I don’t think I would like it for just the reasons you mention.

I do see a redivision of the page, with the actual results in a much narrower column and a much larger space given to ads on the right. This is consistent with Google’s core business, which is not delivering information to searchers but delivering an audience to advertisers. As Siva Vaidhyanathan says in The Googlization of Everything, “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product.”

@Jeruba I don’t have ads in the space to the right – they seem to be reserving this space for what they call “instant results” or some such. There’s an arrow to the right of the result that you can hover your cursor over, and see an image of the page, much like the way Google Images works now. That is an innovation I like.

Since I’m not related to the Anthony family researching chloroform, it doesn’t really effect me one way or another :)

Everybody knows by now that Google keeps all of your search results FOREVER so those who have something to hide should make the effort to seek out a public computer.

I have nothing to hide so I really don’t care.

Ah, @Buttonstc, my dear, perhaps you are not paranoid enough.

It isn’t enough to be innocent or have nothing to hide. It isn’t even enough to look innocent. Selective information can make anybody look bad.

Suppose, just suppose, you were helping your school-age child look up information about gasoline in order to do a report on alternative energy. And suppose you were planning to sell your late grandmother’s antiques on eBay and wanted to decide whether bubble wrap or styrofoam peanuts were a more cost-effective packing material. Now comes some government agent accusing you of planning to make napalm in your garage. Your searches aren’t proof of anything—but do you look completely innocent?

This example might be pretty weak, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that innocent information can be made to look suspicious just by what is singled out and what it’s combined with. It’s not whether you have anything to hide but what false conclusions can be drawn from pieces of the truth.

I am a law-abiding American-born citizen who has never been arrested for anything and is not conspiring or planning or even imagining performing any illegal act. But I don’t trust others to treat my innocent information with respect and care because I know they can use it in a thousand different ways to make me uncomfortable if they want to, and also to mislead, deceive, and wrongfully influence me and possibly even coerce me. They can color or restrict my knowledge about the world and even affect such seemingly innocuous but potentially lucrative things as my purchasing decisions (and those of millions of others).

That is why I guard my privacy and worry about Google’s and Amazon’s acres of data servers: because I mistrust the information gatherers, information owners, and information users and not because the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth would do me harm.

This thread seems to dovetail with this other recent discussion.

’‘scratches noggin’’ My Google doesn’t do that.
Well, I guess it can be useful, although personally I would kinda find it pointless. In my search habits, some site I return to regularly, well, it’s bookmarked and I don’t need to be told how many times I’ve been there.
If it’s a one time deal, chances are, I won’t return to the site again, so…eh.

@Jeruba

You’re right. I’m not paranoid enough.

I haven’t noticed these changes.

Didn’t notice.