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.
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.