Companies call these prompts. Technicians call them nags. The rest of us on the internet call them pop-ups and hate them.
However, despite the game of whack-a-mole we can try playing with ad blockers, browser add-ons or advanced settings, pop-ups are an eternal scourge of online life.
Some Google search users were recently reminded of this inescapable fact when a pop-up screen suddenly appeared asking them to share their exact location for better search results.
After you perform certain search queries, the window appears and asks if you’d like to “see results closer to you.” The prompt then gives you two options:
Use exact location
Not now
Notice that the all-important “Don’t show me this again” option is not available here. In fact, if you press not now, this window will always pop up again and again on future searches; This is a fact that many Google users are starting to realize.
Since December, this pop-up has emerged as a source of outrage on numerous forums, including Reddit, Quora, and Google’s own support page for the Chrome browser. As commenters noted, this prompt appears even if you’ve chosen not to allow sites to see your location in your browser settings. In other words, the window warns people who do not want to share their precise location.
Commenters on these forums have suggested a number of workarounds. But it’s unclear whether any of these will permanently stop the window from appearing.
Part of what makes this pop-up particularly jarring is that it interrupts the seamless search experience users have known for decades. Let’s not forget that Google boasts about how quickly it returns your results after every search, and these results are often in less than a second.
We asked Google about this prompt. The company says this is intended to provide people with better search results for certain queries, where using a precise location might be particularly useful. For example, if you search for things like Italian food or pet supplies, Google might focus on restaurants or pet stores that are very close to you.
However, it’s worth noting that Google will already guess your public area using your internet connection’s IP address and other sources (even if you’re browsing privately), so searching for Italian food without sharing your exact location will likely produce the same handful of Italian food. restaurants you’re lucky enough to live near. Unless you live on an Italian food desert, in which case you can only have a few far-flung Olive Gardens.
But back to the topic: Google says this message is designed to only show up for search queries where it might be useful, and that the company continues to refine the mechanisms it uses to determine the usefulness of this message. So at least the pop-up may appear less frequently over time. It’s also designed to only appear once in a 24-hour period regardless of what you’re searching for, though some users have reported seeing it more frequently.