I have, and I don’t like it. For example, I googled ‘airline’, and the first 11 returns were airline webpages or sites like Kayak. The wiki page was the 12th return. It does seem to be kind of capricious- if I google ‘hamburger’ I get the wiki page right at the top, but googling ‘burger’ drops it to the 10th or so return, below a bunch of local burger places.
Weirdly, googling the word “invidious” like **Septimus **did upthread, only gets me definitions at the top- the “google” definition, then dictionary-type links for several pages. I wonder if google is trying to tailor search responses according to some algorithm- maybe **Septimus **looks up more movies/movie stuff, or buys more tickets online than I do?
Google is an ad company that happens to have free add-ons such as email. They won’t charge you for such things, but neither will they provide customer service, tech support, and they certainly won’t listen to your preferences.
Google search was great in 1996. It, like, searched for what you typed. It long ago stopped searching for what you type - instead, it searches for something to sell you, that you might be able to be convinced is related to what you type. Convincing you that it has found what you wanted, when it definitely hasn’t, is now Google’s ONLY business. Everything Google does is to make you think that what they’re offering was what you wanted - the trick is (a) to make you forget what you REALLY wanted, and (b) to make the substitute appear plausible.
Google Finance: I tried to get along with the increasingly-flaky, sometimes-flat-out-wrong Google Finance, but am now happy with…Yahoo Finance. I know, right? I never would have thought that Yahoo would have something markedly better than Google.
I’ve used their Portfolio page to set up 6-10 stocks, and their Summary tab gives me a great view of today’s activity. Basically, all the good stuff I used to have with Google.
I tried several other places like Morningstar, and they all had their charms, but none gave me everything I wanted in a single easy-to-use* interface.
Maps is still very useful. The big problem I have with it is they keep trying to convert 2D overhead data to 3D and it looks like crap. The unaltered 2D is much clearer and easier to use.
Did any of your try Mappingsupport (aka Gmap4) when it was available? Wonderful! It used the whole screen for the map — no space-wasting menus; no annoying “user-friendliness.” Up in the top right were two drop-down menus that were just perfect, including one that let you pick from among about 10 different source maps. I’d happily pay several dollars a year to get it back, but I suppose Google wouldn’t want to rent the rights to its source maps for any price.
Me too, as I noted. The ridiculous behavior was just there for a while last month. Maybe they noticed how ridiculous it was and rolled some of their changes back.
Another thing that Google is now doing, and it drives me up the wall, is: coming up with hits on Yahoo even though I entered the search term in Google. I think I may have fixed it by messing around with the settings though.
They are competitors, maybe it’s your browser doing that? What browser are you using? You probably just need to change the default search engine in your browser. I think Firefox and Google had a tiff and Firefox started using Yahoo as the default.
I got a panicked email at work from my mother when Smart Compose kicked in on her account…she was completely unaware of an impending change, and thought something had happened to her computer. Fortunately, Gmail finally provided a notification while she was typing a response to me, and she was able to turn it off.
I’m still pissed at Google for deciding to discontinue Inbox. I understand that it was, essentially, an experimental playground app with relatively little adoption compared to the standard Gmail app…but the the mobile interface is awesome, and I’ve really enjoyed bundling emails by topic. Not enough of the cool stuff has made it over to Gmail, IMO.
I’m also extremely unhappy with the impending elimination of their old News & Weather app – which allowed you to customize your Google News page by source and topic – with plain old News, which presents an unchangeable set of topics. The only customization involves blocking a source or marking a story – “more like this” or “less like this”.
It wasn’t. Smart Replies appeared as a “feature” in my Gmail on Monday when the new version was foist upon me. There was no option to turn it off so I used UBlock Origin to block the *.brb element that creates them.