Especially on mobile, making it challenging to edit URLs on their latest chrome browser. UX consistency has gone out the window for weird things like like swapping around the tab ordering for searches (check out chicago, chicagos and chicago's here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cm0C1o8VYAgLv2O?format=png)
Other things like not providing custom date ranges on mobile search are just utterly baffling. Booleans are gone, ranges are gone, and it ignores most of the words I put in. I honestly think alta vista results circa 1997 were better than what I'm getting these days. In fact, they most certainly were.
They've also abandoned their namesake "googol" ... they don't seem to care about http, newsgroups or many other things. They should probably rename themselves to "Around300orso"
Google ceased providing functional tools for technical people a while ago. There's some decent open space for another firm to come along (like DDG or perhaps the Microsoft Renaissance) and just snatch the technical user, create compelling products for just that, and own it.
I'd even pay probably $250/yr or so for such a no-bullshit resource stack - a high quality searchable answers-oriented quick-to-use, quick-to-read technical reference without a bunch of wrong information or concrete answers buried in pages of theory. Heck, I'd probably consider dropping $2,000, that sounds amazing.
The thing is: Most searches aren't even that complicated. Whatever "magic" (read: extra processing power) Google uses is mostly helping for extreme niche cases. The rest they seem to do, nowadays, is "editorializing" results, pushing popular websites before more relevant ones, displaying results from some internal database, etc.
As far as I can tell, 6 years ago the reason was that AWS didn't support IPv6[0]. It has for 2.5 years by now though.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180909174057/https://duck.co/f...
I doubt they have any IP-dependent code, since their main selling point is not tracking anything.
I've actually run into Gabriel a few times online and had a bit of conversation with him. Nice guy. Can't really say I've chatted it up with Eric Schmidt...
Sometimes Google seems to be better at guessing the context especially if you search for C and some other term that has a bunch of different meanings.
I find it pretty funny that I automatically add !g when the Google results suck as well.
This makes me sad, because I will often have very exact queries like a part number and there is content out there on the internet that I cannot locate with search.
Entirely fictional example: "hacker news comment bold"
And seemingly every time, the specific thing is crossed out. At that point Google search is worse than useless.
I have a few hypotheses:
1) They are trying to turn it into a general directory in their continued war on DNS.
2) The web has got so big that their technology just isn't good enough anymore.
3) The users they care about are no longer people (such as technical or, per sibling comment, academic) who are trying to find specific information. They prefer to focus on mass-market.
Our strongest defence as consumers is to resist the further slide into monopoly.
This is the only explanation that makes sense. The vast majority of people probably enter questions and queries in natural language so a purely keyword based search is out the window. Why a list of stop words wouldn't cover that I don't know, but let's just assume it doesn't. The second point is that most people also probably hardly ever look for precise information but ask ambiguous stuff that's just hard to properly answer with traditional approaches.
So my guess is that at some point they realized that most queries are of that kind, then shortly discussed keeping two search engines in parallel and finally went with "screw those stupid devs, we're freaking Google!"
And gods help you if you are looking for something both old and by keyword, because Google sure won't.
Unfortunately, DDG has a lot of the same issues - which is a shame, as if they just used Google's algorithm of a decade ago I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Google say they removed it because most searches that included a plus operator were using it wrong.
https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...
> In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users - but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for. In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.
I'd be intersted to know how often the "quotes" are used correctly.
I end up having to put everything in double quotes just to get results that I'd expect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999#904784
> Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room Doors open 6pm $18 Pre-Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.
At first, I thought my search skills had evaporated, but I realized Google has become little more than a digital flea market. Even Yandex is better in many regards than Google.
Why not just search for what I typed? It has gone backwards.
Still has its problems, but better than the default search mode.
As for the sentence search, it appears to me that they are using stemmed shingles. For that, you reduce words to their base form (houses -> house) and then you chop the page down into every 3-pair of words and hash those. The hashed number for 3 words is then called one shingle. Again, that's a common technique for content similarity detection, so Google kind of has to do that anyway to spot verbatim copycats. One can then also use this for sentence search by searching for all the shingles in the search query, but that introduces ambiguity. For example "cats singing in front of the house" would likely have the same shingles as "cat sang about front before houses", as only "cat sing front house" are being indexed. The issue here is that "front" can be used both in a positional way, as well as for a military formation.
To me, both of these look like side-effects of them reducing operational costs. I mean, who would bid marketing dollars on "ISpatialAudioClient::GetMaxDynamicObjectCount" ? Given that you will likely tolerate 2-3 complete search failures before trying Bing, the business value of completing such a query correctly is very close to 0.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a stronger interest in people finding MS APIs, which is why you will find this result on Bing https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/55776-software-to-s... but not on Google.
Whenever I see someone using DDG as a default they always turn to Google for more complex queries.
It might be that Google hat lost focus of a few search niches where results used to be better.