from Hacker News

Chrome purposefully breaks custom search engines

by arcatek on 2/15/21, 10:51 AM with 5 comments

• by vatueil on 2/16/21, 1:02 AM

  The rationale given by /u/justin_chrome for the change appears faulty. Yes, keywords could be confusing if they're short, e.g. "r" for reddit or "w" for Wikipedia, and if users didn't expect that the short keyword would trigger a custom search instead of searching for the term on Google.

  But short keywords must be manually assigned, so only power users for whom the feature is working as expected would encounter that behavior. (Power users have probably also learned how to minimize conflicts, such as by using two-letter keywords instead of a single letter.) The casual users that might be confused won't run into the issue in the first place because they don't even use short custom keywords.

  When Chrome automatically detects custom search engines, it by default assigns the full domain name as the keyword, e.g. "en.wikipedia.org". What sort of user would type out "en.wikipedia.org elephant" and get confused when they're sent to Wikipedia instead of Google? Casual users would have typed "wikipedia elephant" instead and gone to Google as expected. Power users would know about custom search engines (and probably manually changed the keyword to something shorter).

  It's not clear who this change is supposed to help. Casual users who are somehow using keywords set up by power users? Users who knew how to set up keywords but forgot how to use them?

  On top of all this the change was not communicated to users, so users had to go to reddit to find out what had gone wrong and broken their custom search queries.

• by arcatek on 2/15/21, 10:55 AM

  I'm really disappointed in this change - we use an internal extension in my company to quickly jump from one place to another, and this change means that all our internal users will have to re-learn this workflow - with the expectation some never will, since <tab> is quite harder to reach on most keyboards than <space>.

  Given how obvious is the accessibility issue, and how silent was the change, it's hard to read it as a positive change when it's clear that the deciding factor is that it's been deemed better to have users unintentionally reach Google than the search engines they explicitly decided.

• by arkitaip on 2/15/21, 11:52 AM

  "Longer explanation: This feature has always triggered in one of two ways: keyword tab key search term and keyword spacebar search term. We have disabled the latter because we believe that it was resulting in unintentional triggering for some users."

  The second triggering did happen to me occasionally so I understand the rationale behind this change but switching to tab is going to seriously require some re-learning of muscle memory. Since custom search engines seems like a pro feature and pros probably are used to them by now, maybe let it be?

• by Arnt on 2/15/21, 12:42 PM

  It does rather sound as if Chrome should have add a "DID YOU MEAN" box here for a while, for queries where its interpretation changed.

• by forgotmypw17 on 2/15/21, 10:58 AM

  mirrors all my experiences with chrome. "we decided to change things and there is no going back."

  i use 5 different more capable browsers every day. chromium for videochat and google services.