Wait, what?

[brooksmoses]

When did Google become Reddit?

I just did a search for some stuff, and was attempting to use keyboard navigation on the webpage and managed to accidentally open a comment box under one of the search results.

I don't know if that sufficiently conveys my startlement. I was using Google. And suddenly there was a comment box for commenting on the link. In the middle of the search results page.

Does this sound normal? No. This is not normal.

Anyhow, I then looked closer at some other small gray icons that I had never noticed before and would have continued not noticing except that now the tabbing between links was selecting them, and discovered that one was "promote" and one was "remove", and indeed at the end of the result textblock was a "comment" icon. I am not sure what the results of adding comments or promoting or removing links are, but this is ... nonetheless rather a startling development.

(Also, I've noticed that for results that link to things like forums or blog comment threads, it puts the dates on the results page. That one's actually really quite useful.)

Comments

[falsedrow.livejournal.com]

FWIW:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115764

[brooksmoses]

Ah, I see. So it's all stuff for "if I do this search a lot" sorts of things -- all of that affects what I see when I search for the same thing or related things, but nobody else sees it.

How ... completely pointless to how I use Google, basically.

[zeborah]

It's been like that for... a few weeks, a month? I think at some point they were going to aggregate the results to improve the search for everyone, but I think they soon decided that it's not been quite such a success as all that.