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I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be:

I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.

reitanqild 12y ago
The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
- ht_th 12y ago
  The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time). I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
  - k__ 12y ago
    What about p2p search engines? Are they any good?
    - dublinben 12y ago
      Yacy is usable right now, and gets better the more people use it. http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/
  - 7952 12y ago
    What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
    - diydsp 12y ago
      I've said this before, but google search is turning into the yellow pages.
    - ht_th 12y ago
      Yes. General search will give you general results. For day-to-day issues, like finding a nice restaurant in my neighborhood or some information of a device I own, it'll give everyone good results and that's fine. But once search become personal, i.e. about topics and issues you care about and (potentially) know a lot about, general search results aren't acceptable anymore as you know they're incomplete, not ranked accordingly to any meaningful measure given your understanding of the domain, and over-all the "generalness" of the results.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).
- userbinator 12y ago
  Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.
- ninkendo 12y ago
  Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.
pasbesoin 12y ago
It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished. Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.

reitanqild 12y ago

The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)

ht_th 12y ago
The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time). I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
- k__ 12y ago
  What about p2p search engines? Are they any good?
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Yacy is usable right now, and gets better the more people use it. http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/
- 7952 12y ago
  What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
  - diydsp 12y ago
    I've said this before, but google search is turning into the yellow pages.
  - ht_th 12y ago
    Yes. General search will give you general results. For day-to-day issues, like finding a nice restaurant in my neighborhood or some information of a device I own, it'll give everyone good results and that's fine. But once search become personal, i.e. about topics and issues you care about and (potentially) know a lot about, general search results aren't acceptable anymore as you know they're incomplete, not ranked accordingly to any meaningful measure given your understanding of the domain, and over-all the "generalness" of the results.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.

vanderZwan 12y ago
DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).
userbinator 12y ago
Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.
ninkendo 12y ago
Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.

pasbesoin 12y ago

It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished. Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.