Clarifying the Yahoo and Google Confusion with Lucky
Yesterday, I launched Lucky, a Safari extension that removes the clutter from Google search results. Many people are confused by the setup instructions, so let me explain:
I thought Lucky improves Google search? What does this have to do with Yahoo?
Lucky fetches Google’s results and shows them on Yahoo. The specific webpage doesn’t matter, I could’ve used any site. I could’ve used zombo.com. Yahoo is just a vessel to display results from Google.
Can’t you just make Lucky work on google.com?
You might still want to access the original google.com for things like searching for flights, hotels, sports scores, or solving math problems. These features aren’t available with “10 blue links.”
Why do I have to set my default search engine to Yahoo?
This allows you to search with Lucky directly from the address bar. It’s similar to how DuckDuckGo used to work before it was an option in Safari.
I’m still confused. So whose results am I seeing? Google or Yahoo?
You’re seeing Google’s results.
Additional Issues
Aside from the Yahoo-related questions, there are a few other issues that users have encountered:
I live in the EU and Lucky seems to be flaky for me.
In the EU, Google sometimes shows a cookie consent page that you have to accept before accessing the search results. This is fixed in Lucky 1.0.3.
My network is being flagged by Google, and I have to solve multiple captchas to access the Google homepage.
Lucky can’t help with that. You should get a refund from Apple.
I tried to solve this by letting you solve captchas in the app and sending those cookies to Google, but it didn’t work well. Sorry I couldn’t come up with a better solution.