To be even more frank, Google's search capabilities diminished around late 2000s early 2010s for me. I used to be able to write out anything verbatim and find it. Now I can't even get the double quotes trick to work properly. Google's strengths have been slowly crippled for years.

Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.

I don't know if it still works, but plus triple double quotes used to work as a verbatim match. Iirc I picked it up here when they broke double quote search a while back (which they fixed at some point).

But last I checked, +"""search phrase""" works

A tip I saw here a couple of weeks ago that restored some quality to searches was to, after searching, open the drop-down menu from “Tools”, select “all results” and then “verbatim”.

I do all of my searches in incognito so sadly I don’t know if the options is remembered or not.

Huh, I didn't know that. I now use a meta engine, so I don't really keep up with Google dorking, but that is good to know for the few times I fall back to a Google search.

Ah! That sounds like a life saver!

Lately I've been finding that quoting doesn't have strong effects and even more frustratingly "-" appears to no longer do anything. So instead of filtering out the word it just ends up giving me that word more and I have to search some complex baby robot speech to get nuanced results. Or maybe Google just hates me

  Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email?

Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users.

I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.

AFAIK, they do man a public relations address. It's for managing news outlets, not customer support.

In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.

I never report anything to Google. They don't give back.

When I try to report mail spam from their network they want me to fill out a form instead of reading the abuse mail they got.

For Google one and enterprise customers, I do believe there is a support line where you speak to an actual human

> It makes me wonder if all the phishing and spam I'm reporting even does anything.

I'm usually first in line to hate on Google, but I report a lot of phishing to them and at least when it comes to phishing sites being hosted by Google they tend to take them down pretty quickly. I never get a response, and I assume that it's all automated, but it's a lot better than a lot of other hosts.

In 2007 I had posted something on a message board that personally identified me. I had the post removed from the forum but it was captured on Google's result summary. I literally emailed Google asking if they could remove it and they not only did, someone responded saying "done."

Such a different era.

have you run into websites that stop working because of this?