This has been getting me lots lately. It used to be 1 attempt, maybe 2, to find what I'm after.. lately I find myself regularly needing to try >4 different searches before getting what I'm after. I've consciously noticed that Google seems to have lost the whole thing that made them so great in the first place.
And now, among other things, Google is losing power users. They shouldn't forget that they gained popularity in the beginning by word of mouth which in this industry literally means: by power users' recommendations to others. It's the power user who would (or wouldn't) be replacing Bing with Google on his family member's new laptop.
This is crucial in my opinion: don't try to guess what people want to find, just guess how they want to be looking for something - anything.
Boy, this bubble doesn't think too highly of the outside world, does it? What an attitude. We're not all idiots.
As someone who has run product before, I can tell you there's always some self-entitled blowhard who feels you owe them something for the time they spend on your product, or their "help". No one is upset when they finally leave (and they always do).
The fact that you have switched away from Google products (and are threatening to leave the last) means your value to Google is likely slightly above zero. But I'm sure the competition are beating down your door for your business.
The menus may appear a bit mor simplified at the surface but if you dig down you will find what you are looking for.
Speaking of GMail, it's the same attitude basically. For example they added these automatic labels with some nonsensical heuristics, which don't work most of the time and are impossible to remove. One more "smart" improvement and I'm closing my GMail account for good, seriously.
When I started to think about how Google was privy to just about all of my online and some of my real-life activity, it occurred to me they could build a disturbingly accurate profile on me, and while I'm just a boring 30-something middle-class white guy, I still found that creepy. Now I spread my data out between Google, BlackBerry, Outlook, and Yahoo and it's not really any less convenient than having it all integrated (the phone does integrate it all I suppose, but BlackBerry is not trying to use that data to show me ads).
http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
This is the first time I've even heard of this mode. As with the original article, I think this speaks to the massive power of the "default". Once upon a time Google's "default" was excellent for my use case, but it's slowly degraded over the years, and rather than dig through all of its options trying to make Google useful again, I just whined about it and started looking at competing services.
Changes in default behavior should be embarked upon with extreme caution. This is especially true when considering the way google does this (with many incremental changes that are totally invisible individually). I feel like if they more prominently highlighted 1) what they were changing and 2) how to work around it they could avoid much backlash from "power" users.
Firefox, in contrast, makes it very clear what they're doing when they change the default search engine, and it's pretty easy to switch back to google. But clearly for a large number of users, that "default" will be good enough.
It's like the mode to disable 'personalised results' (AKA filter bubbles) - I've explained it to several people in the last few months and they were all amazingly grateful. Of course, we still don't have any way to measure where there is no filter bubbling with them off, or just less... :(
They seem to be aiming for a TV-like experience by showing you whatever they want and not what you search for (maybe Google should be called an inspiration engine nowadays, for lack of a better word)
To disable search result personalization: https://www.google.com/history/optout
If Google returns a "popular" result, I usually add a second keyword to specifying the domain which usually returns the correct result.
Would there be a way to be personalized and anonymous at the same time? Or is that an oxymoron?
As you say "django" gives you the movie, but "django class based views" gives you what you would expect.
For most search I feel that DuckDuckGo has become increasingly good, while Google has become worse. It might be because I don't login or flush cookies when I close my browser, but that would mean that Google rely on personalization to a disturbing degree.
My progression is DDG => !SP => !G
You refuse to tell them anything about yourself.
That's not having your privacy invaded, that's wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
It's a human language question, not an FMRI.
One of the biggest things that irks me now about Google. Sometimes I want to search just for the word, "sofa" I don't need you to match it with "relevant" other words like "couch"
For you. For this one use-case. Which may or may not be good.
It's the effect of this scaled up, for all use-cases Google's cluster can identify, for all users which is bad. It's one of the reasons I use DDG instead of Google these days.
if I wanted those results I would search with Acive directoy as part of the flipping query!
No, it shouldn't. Some people care about their privacy.
I also hate this fascination with search in general. If I want somefile, I know it's in Documents/stuff/foo_project/ ; I don't need to search for it.
Well, obviously it needs to be switchable, and it certainly will be both in Linux and in Windows. Not so much in Google OS, obviously.
Again, I'm not voicing my personal opinions and preferences on whether and how I want to see search integrated into a desktop OS. I'm arguing that Bing won't go away because the current industry trends require Microsoft to have a reasonably good search engine under its control.
As for local searches commingling with online searches, there are some cases where it makes sense, others where it's a blatant violation of privacy, and many more in a subjective grey area. It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed (really informed, not small-print-in-the-legalese informed) and needing to opt in, not out.
It does on Ubuntu/Mac OS.
>It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed... and needing to opt in, not out.
Shame nobody actually does this though. Also, does opting out actually stop the data grabbing, or just hide those results?
Personally, I think that's just bad ux, it's simplification one step too far. The user might not want these search services to know they are searching for some terms. That's a distinction that I know many users clearly don't care about though.
2005-2013 Microsoft online services, including Bing lost $10.9bn [1] and "continue to report a loss of $1.3bn/year" [2] as of early 2014. I think people are projecting breakeven 2016. Competing with Google is not easy.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-reorg-earnings-repo... [2] https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-...
This is actually the main reason I use Bing; if search engines are going to track me I might as well get paid for it. The search results are usually as good or better than Google; YMMV. It's very rare I have to resort to a Google search and when I do it's usually just as bad.
I think the expense of developing Bing is as much about the problems of a very successful company with lots of cash developing a new product as it is about the problems of developing a search engine.
Unless you use the "Verbatim" option. Shame it can't be enabled by default, though.
Bing, on the other hand... last time I tested it was very strict, where did all these trash result come from, ugh.
Mozilla recently reworked their search bar to make it much harder to change the default (coincidentally, at the same time as they changed it to yahoo... imagine that ;) ).
You can get the old one back in about:config:
browser.search.showOneOffButtons = false
Completely agreed on google and matching - it's got too 'smart' for its own good, and when I'm searching for specific words, it often 'helpfully' includes results for the complete opposite too, or for reversed word order that completely changes the meaning (e.g. foo guide for bar users == bar guide for foo users according to google). If I'm looking for anything at all specific or complex, I use DuckDuckGo or even Yahoo. I try to use DuckDuckGo day to day when I can too, of course, for privacy reasons.
The rot started when google stopped supporting boolean operators, +, and "".
https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2014/11/find-it-faster/
What are you talking about?
* Extra clicks to use non-default engine, especially for multiple searches in a row.
* Options to add/remove engines or change the default are very well hidden.
* No way to get suggestions from the non-default (or just stop asking the default for suggestions at all, if your default is Google/Yahoo/etc.). Prime example is Wikipedia autocompleting from page names - now not possible unless it's your default.
* Always by default assumes you want the default search engine when you might want to switch back and forth with your active one.
* No indication of what the default search engine even is.
* Looks stupidly messy with 12+ search engines (seriously, do you only use google or something? Once you have Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, Google Images, various wikis and news sites all added, it's a total mess with the new clusterfuck of a UI).
* Searching through a list of favicons sucks compared to having a dropdown with favicon and name.
* Broken keyboard shortcuts.
(Notice also how the current search engine being used is represented with icon and name.)
Clicking "Change search settings" brings you to a dialog which clearly gives you the ability to set the default and remove unwanted search-engines:
Yes. It's one more click than it used to be. But now it's visually 100% clear what it does and how it does it.
The previous incarnation required one less click, but my guess is that most users didn't even know they had the option to change defaults or remove search-engines since it was not spelled out explicitly.
It may not address all your concerns, like suggestions on non-default engines, but I think overall it's not 100% a degradation either.
Perhaps each upgrade resets the choice, I cannot confirm as I haven't seen an upgrade since 34.x (I do wish they would have handled the ssl 3 issue with more care, having to use the about page to neuter protection to access many devices is a chore)
Or wish to support Mozilla through their deal with Yahoo!.
This is exactly right and something I have been arguing for a while. Google's algos are good for finding what is popular, not necessarily what is right (though these things often overlap).
I live in China, and recently switched from Google (blocked) to Yahoo Japan (not blocked, but Google has a majority share in them meaning it uses Google in the back). Yahoo Japan is the only Google way to access Google that is not blocked in China.
Yahoo doesn't really have a search engine, and hasn't for five years. They resell Bing and add some in-house content. The only reason to search with Yahoo is if you want their in-house content.
Bing is currently more literal-minded than Google. Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for. It's become difficult on Google to search for a non-popular thing that happens to be close to a popular search target. Google does not treat quote marks as a mandatory exact match any more, just a hint.
Running a search engine is so profitable that even the little guys with < 1% market share make money - Ask, InfoSeek, DuckDuckGo, and Blekko are all profitable. (Cuil blew it - no revenue model.) The most valuable ads on the Internet are the ones on search results, because they appear when someone is actively seeking something. Almost all other ads are interruptions. The only thing that keeps the phone vendors and carriers from entering the search engine business is huge payments from Apple, Google, and Bing.
Microsoft's current approach to Bing is unusual. Bing used to have its own CEO; the last one was Satya Nadella, who is now CEO of Microsoft. Now, various parts of Bing are under five different Microsoft VPs who also have other responsibilities. Some people speculated that this was in preparation for closing down or selling off Bing, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Anyone know more about that?