Regarding all the suggestions to change search engines:
Deleting the Google search entry is not an action that can easily be undone, and it will have drastic consequences, such as permanently disabling suggestions and instant for omnibox searches. Creating an alternate entry with the same URL does NOT suffice -- you can't manually enable any of this functionality on the alternate entry.
If you're having this bug, I suggest NOT doing this. Either sit tight until we fix, or if you do create a different entry, KEEP THE ORIGINAL so you can switch back once the fix is out.
--Peter Kasting, Chrome team member and owner of the Omnibox
Other engines can access this functionality just fine (and do, as other people have mentioned). We simply don't have UI for you to manually tweak the relevant settings. (There's a bug on adding such UI, but it's low-priority, so no one's gotten to it.)
Thanks for your openness. I must admit to being slightly amazed that Google would add an irreversible-delete-button to a consumer facing app, without appropriate warnings and whatnot. Is that just an oversight, or is it by design?
We don't allow you to delete your current default engine, but we do allow you to delete other engines, because you should be able to get rid of things you don't want.
We used to have a "restore all settings" button that would fix this (among other things), but it disappeared in the preferences UI rewrite and though I've agitated for it to come back, it hasn't.
From the Chromium issue: "You can recreate the default entry by deleting your "Web Data" file out of your profile and restarting. Note that this will completely reset all your search engines."
Peter, can you give some guidance for those among us who accidentally removed the Google entry? Is it there a workaround we can follow to restore it? Thanks.
Create an alternate Google Search using something like https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%s and leave the old one there. You can set the new one as default for the time being and revert to the original afterwards.
Add a new a search engine in wrench >> settings >> search "Manage Search Engines". Under "other search engines" add a new search engine using this address for the URL http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
Name it "Google 2" or whatever you want. Works like a charm.
We've made a lot of relevancy and speed improvements lately. If you have any specifics, we'd love to hear them. A good way is to try it for a week, collect all the ones that suck and send them to https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html -- we're listening!
Interesting, what makes you say that DDG's results suck? I've been using it as my primary search engine for a few weeks now and aside from it not including a map in results unless you give it a very explicit address, I've found it no worse than Google's results.
ghostfish's message is now gray, so I guess he has been downvoted. Can anyone explain why?
My experience with DDG has been very similar to the one cited by aw3c2: I used it as my primary search engine for a couple of months, and eventually found myself always using !g, so I switched back to google.
On programming searches DDG goes better for me (than Google) because it uses the English data. Google insists on using Spanish data even though I disallow results in other languages than English or Catalan.
For other searches, mostly local information but if it's something recent too, Google goes better. So I use DDG at work, and Google at home.
And, presumably Bing tracks users and uses that data to improve its results. When you use DDG, you're just being tracked as "a DDG user" instead of "a Bing user with cookie=0x23987438743". (I don't know if that's true or not, but it's my current understanding of the situation.)
I think the problem with tracking is not the intrinsic action, but rather the fact we call it "tracking". Tracking is the technique you use to hunt and kill animals. Showing Java results to Java programmers and C# results to C# programmers is a little different from that...
I really want to switch to DDG since I prefer it's results to Google but I always miss the time range filter. I know I'm not alone on this and the answer from DDG is that we can sort by date which is far from an alternative...
The trial is not capitalized! Convention got broken, lol.
If you want your omibox to work exactly like before
Go to Wrench >> settings >> search "Manage Search Engines". Under "other search engines" add a new search engine using this address for the URL
Name: Google2
Keyword: google
URL: {google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:searchFieldTrialParameter}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s
Credit to BolshoiBrit for figuring out part of this, just wanted to publish this one level higher to help people
A little bit more privacy, a little bit less trackable (And, for this crowd, I should point out it'll strip the search query from the referrer when you click the search links in the ssl version of Google's SERPs - so the Google Analytics (or any other analytics tools) won't have those inbound search query strings. The website marketer in me hates it when people do that, the privacy-loving-libertarian in me loves it…)
> I should point out it'll strip the search query from the referrer when you click the search links in the ssl version of Google's SERPs - so the Google Analytics (or any other analytics tools) won't have those inbound search query strings.
Last time I looked I don't think it was true. Analytics will get the data from the magic string in the referrer.
Ah, I understand what you mean now - Google deliberately redirect to their own site on http in order to "leak" that information in the referrer header. So we're both right, I just didn't understand you, sorry.
The dns magic underneath encrypted.google.com, www.google.com and www.google.com.au shows that doesn't matter - all three are "in Australia" (at the very least, within 21ms) from where I am (Sydney):
[Bigs-MacBook-Pro:~] bigiain% traceroute www.google.com.au
traceroute: Warning: www.google.com.au has multiple addresses; using 74.125.237.87
traceroute to www-cctld.l.google.com (74.125.237.87), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.558 ms 1.766 ms 1.582 ms
…
8 syd01s06-in-f23.1e100.net (74.125.237.87) 20.318 ms 20.009 ms 20.457 ms
[Bigs-MacBook-Pro:~] bigiain% traceroute www.google.com
traceroute: Warning: www.google.com has multiple addresses; using 74.125.237.81
traceroute to www.l.google.com (74.125.237.81), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 1.962 ms 3.753 ms 1.618 ms
…
9 syd01s06-in-f17.1e100.net (74.125.237.81) 19.927 ms 20.220 ms 20.404 ms
[Bigs-MacBook-Pro:~] bigiain% traceroute encrypted.google.com
traceroute: Warning: encrypted.google.com has multiple addresses; using 74.125.237.100
traceroute to www3.l.google.com (74.125.237.100), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 17.068 ms 8.808 ms 1.609 ms
…
8 syd01s12-in-f4.1e100.net (74.125.237.100) 21.235 ms 20.064 ms 19.237 ms
If I search for something where I might expect a regionally-customised result, like "newspaper", I get "The Sun", "The New York Times" and "The Guardian" from encrypted.google.com, but I get the SMH, "The Australian", etc. etc. from a regular google.com.au search.
Google puts the tracking into the results now too, I used to use the 'Undirect' extension but it's currently losing the constant fight to properly detect and remove the tracking from the results. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dohbiijnjeiejifbgf...
This is a cool concept for many reasons... for example, I should use this to add the pws=0 'temporarily disable personalized search' parameter.
Because the bug-tracking system doesn't have a noise-free way to say "this affects me too", the way that bugzilla and launchpad do. And "this affects me too" can potentially provide useful information, to gauge how many people an issue affects and thus what priority to give it.
Everyone has a google account so they can easily jump in (as opposed to bugzilla/launchpad), and soon the snowball effect kicks in.
This isn't the bug-tracking system, where it's supposed to be done by 'starring' an issue. Even there the concept is not emphasized enough so the same problem occurs.
Once they do that, you can "star" the issue. The Chrome team can sort their bug lists by "number of stars" during prioritization and you'll get e-mails when the bug's status changes if you star the bug.
Your answer explained why it is helpful to google. It does not explain why individuals post "me too," or why people are posting "me too" here on the HN page...
There is a similar behavior here on HN with nice- page / I-agree / congrats posts. I'm wary of a general guideline that I should only post to HN if I think the karma reward will be greater than X, but more often than not I think it helps make sure any of my posts actually increase the numerator in the SNRatio.
Since the per post karma have been removed the only way to show you agree is to write an "I agree" post. If I upvote it only the author will see that someone upvoted it, but it is also information that is valuable to others. Hence, the only way to truly support a comment is to write a "me too" or try to rewrite "me too" into some rambling as if you had something else to contribute with but don't (which is arguably even worse).
Not defending it or saying that hiding the per post karma is bad, but it is understandable and one of the drawbacks of hiding the per post karma.
"Me too" is often used as a way to bump a forum thread back to the front page of forum software so that mods and others can have time to participate before the thread rolls off into murky ancient history. For instance, you very often see this in game forums.
Now, my pet theory is that game forums seeded this behavior, and now more people use it even on forums where it is technically unnecessary.
That said, I wonder what the game theoretical explanation is.
The star doesn't inherently say "I have this bug too". It just acts like a bookmark to find the bug later. That correlates with the number of people who want the bug fixed, somewhat, but it doesn't directly indicate how many people have experienced the bug.
That rather surprises me as well. I thought there'd be more analysis of what was happening - I looked in WebKit Inspector and noted some odd things. Something about a "hidden socket" in chrome.
Same problem here. Seems to happen when you're in a logged out state. Wonder how QA missed this. Maybe we can help out, go star this issue in the Chromium bug tracker in case it affects the FOSS edition as well. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84679&...
Hopefully the author of the Undirect extension will update it to work (remove redirects from search results), but it seems like a constant battle that he doesn't have much incentive to keep fighting.
I'm surprised the top comment isn't more along the lines of "wtf went wrong" rather than a +1 me too.
Seriously, it seems this is a huge fuck up that probably costed millions and millions of hits worth of traffic. 1 hr of time when users got redirected to blank.html?
Happening to me, too. When searching directly from the address bar, it appears to be loading my Google search results and nothing ever comes up. Going to Google directly and search is still fine.
It appears to be Chrome's ability to translate your text into a search query string. For instance, if I just type "y combinator" in to the address bar, it craps out. But if I type "google.com/search?q=y+combinator" it behaves as one would expect.
I just had to shut down my chrome a few minutes ago and restart because I have persistent issues with tabs becoming unresponsive, where you can still scroll, but you can't click on links or highlight anything. The tabs either refuse to close entirely or take several seconds to close.
I know that chrome is supposed to be more robust by isolating the the processes of each tab, but my entire chrome hangs for 10 or 20 seconds at a time nearly once a week. I love the browser, because it feels very lightweight, but these issues have been dampening that feeling lately. I don't have any exotic plugins and I've got a new computer, so I figured I'd share that chrome is by no means as great for everyone as it is for most people.
You know, i was just wondering if the bing team had noticed a spike in traffic as people switch their default searchers today? DDG as well, i guess. I'd love to see gabriel weinberg do a write-up about his stats for today :)
Going to Google.com and disabling Instant Search, searching for something and then enabling it back worked for me. Now, searching from the address bar on Chrome works fine and am no longer redirected to blank.html.
Hidden in that long chain are some folks suggesting that turning off instant search fixed the problem. Don't know if that's actually the problem, but it may help those of you experiencing the issue.
Right, where (in Firefox) you could just hit ctrl+k / cmd+k to get the cursor into the box (as opposed to ctrl+l / cmd+l to get to the omnibox). Not that much more difficult.
Odd. I actually already had mine turned off so I tried turning it back on and it looked like it was working. I then turned it back off and it continued to work.
i fixed the problem by completely resetting my cookies. I opened up the browser in Incognito and it worked fine, so I figured I'd give a full history clear of history, cache and cookies.
oh man, I have been experiencing this very issue for a few hours tonight and googling the issue led me to this thread. Good to know I was not the only one. The suggested fix seems to resolve the issue for me as well.
This is the first software bug ever in the history of computing! Up until now, all software performed perfectly 100% of the time! The world, it is ending!
Weird, haven't had an issue on any of my three computers, all of which have been running Chrome all day and are up to date.
Of course, they're all on the dev channel. Ironic, this seems to indicate the dev channel is more stable than the stable channel as I've never had any problems like this before.
Oh, didn't know this was a widespread problem. Happened to me as well. The search results display for a fraction of a second then I get the blank screen.
Deleting the Google search entry is not an action that can easily be undone, and it will have drastic consequences, such as permanently disabling suggestions and instant for omnibox searches. Creating an alternate entry with the same URL does NOT suffice -- you can't manually enable any of this functionality on the alternate entry.
If you're having this bug, I suggest NOT doing this. Either sit tight until we fix, or if you do create a different entry, KEEP THE ORIGINAL so you can switch back once the fix is out.
--Peter Kasting, Chrome team member and owner of the Omnibox