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It has been becoming crap a long time now. In the past few years i just need to include, well, everything in quotes just to get somewhat relevant results instea

by arpa 7y ago

It has been becoming crap a long time now. In the past few years i just need to include, well, everything in quotes just to get somewhat relevant results instead of very generic ones. For me it began with their removal of the + search operator (to boost google+ organic traffic from google). Also removal of boolean operators. Also very, very aggressive typo fixing (i meant "Brose Wollis" not "Bruce Wills" god damn it). I think that google home is just the latest thing that furthers googles' exclusive catering to the lowest common denominator - the people who use google as DNS and fail to do even that. I guess there's not that much of ad revenue from power users.

DanBC 7y ago
> For me it began with their removal of the + search operator (to boost google+ organic traffic from google). 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-terms-verbatim.html 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.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  0,5% of the queries used "+" so they removed it? Feels like a dogmatic "data driven" UX change for the sake of change. The interesting number would be how much it was used when the first queries failed and gave to much answers.
  - dTal 7y ago
    "We removed the seatbelts because we found they were used in less than 0.5% of car journeys."
- DanBC 7y ago
  So, I'm not saying I agree with Google here. I'm just providing links to google information about why they said they removed it.

by arpa 7y ago

DanBC 7y ago

> For me it began with their removal of the + search operator (to boost google+ organic traffic from google). 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-terms-verbatim.html 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.

rightbyte 7y ago
0,5% of the queries used "+" so they removed it? Feels like a dogmatic "data driven" UX change for the sake of change. The interesting number would be how much it was used when the first queries failed and gave to much answers.
- dTal 7y ago
  "We removed the seatbelts because we found they were used in less than 0.5% of car journeys."
DanBC 7y ago
So, I'm not saying I agree with Google here. I'm just providing links to google information about why they said they removed it.