I think that google is losing sight of what made them popular to begin with.

[within reason] Every workshop on the planet has a hammer in it. This is because hammers are very simple, they never break, they never behave unexpectedly, they're highly useful, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do as perfectly as anybody can imagine. Hammers are the perfect tools; something that should have been idolized in Brave New World.

Google was a hammer for a long time. It wasn't even a question that google would be the default search engine for everybody who knew anything about anything. Google did search really well, behaved exactly as advertised, rarely broke.

It was perfect. It was a hammer.

It feels like google (overall, I don't just mean search) is losing their grasp on this.

Stuff like charts API. Maybe it's just me, but the new version of this is annoying. It's some javascripty nonsense that feels complicated. It's a laser-guided, nuclear-powered gryoscopically stabilized, diamond-tipped screwdriver that can also make coffee and fold your laundry. You could build a submarine with it.

But it's also got an instruction manual that is a foot thick.

The old api was just: <img src='https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc>;

or something similar.

And now I can't +term, they took away the links to "cached" versions of the pages, things autocomplete (incorrectly), it assumes I meant something that I didn't, it wants to integrate into a social network, etc. etc.

Google...you're starting to feel a little microsofty. Are you okay?

You can still use Image Charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image/

The cached links are still there. They just got moved to the preview page. I assume not enough people used them for the amount of clutter they created in the SERPs.

thanks for mentioning the cache links, I thought they were gone and used the "Cache:URL" query. I don't like the preview pane, never paid any attention to it (actually, I think it's pretty stupid :-)...

I wish Google catered more to geeks.

I understand how Google indexes the web. Let me control my own queries. Give us geeks the ability to enable/disable freshness, even if it means appending &fresh=0 to the URL

They already give you tools all the way to an exact date range search! How much more control do you want.

I didn't realize it when I posted.

Here is Matt Cutts' explanation of the date options:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/useful-google-feature-better-d...

In fact there is. You have to click on one of the other date options before it shows up. For instance, http://www.google.com/webhp?&ie=UTF-8#q=occupy+oakland&#... shows results from the last three days, sorted by date.

Huh, that's good to know. Unfortunately what I was looking for was a reverse sort by date...

The A players are getting old or bored, the B players are trickling in.

Or the PHBs are taking over.

Yes. It is incredibly frustrating.

There's a fine line between being helpful and taking control from the user. Google used to be safely on the helpful side of the line. Now more and more SERPs are wasting my time by making me refine my search with qualifiers to ensure I actually get what I want.

Yes, all the time. I pretty much never expect Google to search for what I asked the first time around now.

If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.

Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially offensive.

That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...

Thanks!

I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly:

  true? scheme

Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

  +true? scheme

Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay.

  "true?" scheme

Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme".

  +"true?" scheme

Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.

Most punctuation isn't indexed. A few terms like C++ and C# are special-cased, and a hyphen usually works, but mostly you just can't search for anything punctuation-related for programming. I was recently trying to learn the difference between the <%= and <%# tags in ASP.NET and Google couldn't even understand the query.

Not that it's an easy problem. How are the spiders and indexers supposed to distinguish "true?" as a programming lexeme versus just an interrogative sentence that ends with "true"?

Sometimes we forget that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte search across the entire web. The pages are all tokenized and indexed, with most punctuation dropped since that is indeed the more common usage case. You don't want a search for a word to miss out on pages where the word was glued to quotes or a comma or something.

Is there a link to "tell google that this autocorrect was wrong" somewhere under the search box?

Because that might be helpful.

They probably keep track of whether you click the "No, really search for my search terms" link.

Ah, this is one of those situations where you'd love to remember an example or more, but everything you try actually works - then sometime a few days later it happens!

I came across this one yesterday when I was looking for more information about something mentioned on HN:

    Search:  carmack +zfail gpl
      Date:  2011-11-02
    Result:  Bad autocorrect; Plus operator broke
    """
    Showing results for carmack fail gpl
    Search instead for carmack zfail gpl
    """

Because the plus operator is broken my final search ended up being `carmack "z-fail" OR "zfail" gpl` because different sources included or excluded the dash. Note that I think it's good that quotes are still exact and they shouldn't do the synonym search, but this is something the plus operator would have worked on, if I remember correctly.

moultano: notice this "fresh" search https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courier

every page in the top 10 organic results were coming from pages that were either added or updated within 2011 except for the youtube results. those 2 videos were added in 2009.

i also noticed that your youtube videoes were higher in the results than articles from gizmodo, arstechnica, engadget, Time magazine and whole slew of other articles that were released 2 days ago.

just asking...

Here's one I just came across.. The search term: where to buy ties in boston

The 4th & 5th results are about car "tires"

You don't have a million yourself? The spell check fires 5 times a day for me and 4 of them are wrong.

Would love to see some of the examples if you have them. Try here if you have search history on: https://www.google.com/history/

I tried this, and began to doubt my stat -- I saw no instances of the problem. But then I tried to repro the problem and I see that history doesn't record it.

E.g. search for [barack obam] (typo intentional). Then when it autocorrects, click the "I meant what I typed" link. Now look at your history: it doesn't mark that in any way.

A recent example, searching for eb_row returns results for 'eyebrow' And the worst thing? The search page is without even the "Did you mean" links!

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=e...

I can't imagine Google devs are happy with this. Cmon Google, let us geeks in on the internal search that your devs use. Host it at geek.google.com or whatever. Probably won't happen since geeks don't click on ads much, and Google is cutting down on dev friendly side projects like code.google.com these days.

Yeah, not even the quotes help in some cases, and I expect Google to show me results that contain the exact word I'm searching for, no matter if it thinks I misspelled it (it's like the algorithm says "let me correct that for you, stupid" :-)...

They probably make more money from ads by autocorrecting.