Google: Don't be Obnoxious!

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was an early fan of Google: Gmail, Search, Map, etc. But much of their stuff is increasingly unusable.

I don’t try to use Google Maps anymore, with superior sites like this one available, or even one that displays different views at once. I suppose there’s a Google button to get “Are you sure you want to revert to the almost-classical version (and be forced back to the inferior version when you clear cookies or at Google’s whim)? Please send us feedback why. Are you really really sure??” – but I’ve better ways to waste my time.

Google Groups is useless except for the Usenet archives, and Google keeps looking for new ways to foul up archive searches.

But one of the biggest annoyances is seen only by people who try to use Google in a foreign country. There are several distinct settings to inform Windows or Google which country you’re in – or want to be in – and Google uses all of them. Sometimes I get everything in English except Google Books. (It can be set to English also, though only by an obscurish procedure.) I’m afraid to clear cookies and start Google from scratch. Even just clearing most-recent cookies seems to send Google back to wrong languages.

Wikipedia is easy: Prefix “en.” to the URL and get English-language. If the license fee for this Wikipedia patent is less than $10 million I recommend Google buy it!! (joking. I know there’s no license fee. Instead, Google is just too smart to imagine the user might know what language he prefers.)

Recently my Home internet failed and I visited Internet shops and was reminded of how frustrating this was. The Google home page does have an option “Use Google.com” but it seems unpredictable which, if either, of Google.com and Google.co.th will be in English … or even which will have an “English” click option.

One of my oft-visited webpages is news.google.com. I get there real easily on my home computer. In fact, since my ‘n’ key is broken, news.google.com is the first choice offered by Chrome when I type “ew” ! But in the Internet cafe, news.google.com didn’t exist at all – it redirects to a useless Google query. I ended up reading news.yahoo.com instead! (In Google’s defense, news.google.co.uk did work – though of course it gives U.K. news. :smack: ) Sometimes, .com is in Thai and .co.th is in English – the opposite of what you’d expect. Once, unable to find any English-language Google at all I switched to Google.fr. Google obviously has an extremely low opinion of its users’ intelligence, but does it really imagine we need help deciding which language we prefer?

(Someone is sure to crack wise and say Beggars can’t be Choosers. But I think Google wants freeloaders like me to click to their pages. I’m trying to help them.)

2

Okay so I did, and this thread is the 7th option.

3

Other than a gmail account that I used to sign up for a few forums a long time ago, I don’t use use anything Google … except to watch Youtube videos while not signed in.

The day I went to log on to Youtube and it insisted I provide my real name, address, and telephone number so they could link all my Google services was the day I quit. It wouldn’t even allow me access to delete a couple videos I had uploaded. That is obnoxious.

BTW, the videos were of me playing very old-time music on classical guitar and mountain dulcimer – definitely not a copyright infringement problem.

4

Google, such as it is, is a much better default choice for everyday reference than the one suggested by the OP, for a number of practical reasons. But Gmap4 is very useful, offering additional choices where Google does not meet your specific needs.

5

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had an article about Google’s hiring practices and what they’re looking for. An HR honcho said that they wanted “intellectually curious, creative people”, rather than experienced specialists (read: young). This was why they had positions that seemed to remain open for a long time - they were “willing to wait.”

I guess all those wonderfully intellectual curious people have to do something to prove they were worth the wait. Dicking unnecessarily with applications and adding needless bells and whistles must be their contribution.

6

Whatever its other failings. Google is still by far the best search engine I’ve found.

If you want obnoxious, there’s bing. It gets all whiny when you’re using a machine set up with bing as its default search engine and you have it search for Google (you get a popup message that Google users who tried bing swear by it, or some such malarkey).

bing is a palpitating pile of crap.

7

Maybe that should have been a warning.

:smiley:

8

Just FYI, it still gave you a chance to opt out of that, even if they did try to de-emphasize it. Few people on YouTube that I interact with use their real names. And I’ve never seen it ask for an address. It did for a while annoy the crud out of people by asking them to put in their cellphone number, but they finally stopped with that.

Yahoo is the only place I’ve seen that actually requires you to put in a phone number–and that’s only if you’ve just signed up.

9

You mean the one with the drop down menu which offers you several Google maps? Yeah, that’s really great.

Bob

10

Nope. I looked. I read every word and followed every link on the page several times. Apparently they had several different versions they were rolling out and I got hit with the one demanding Name, Address, and Phone Number. I didn’t have to USE my real name but I had to give it. They pissed off a lot people and backed off some but the last time I checked (a few years ago) it was still the same page for me demanding all the same information.

I was already having misgivings about Google and knew at that point that I was done with them. I just wanted to remove the videos I had uploaded. No dice.

No way was I interested in letting Google keep a database of every search I did, every email I sent, every map I looked at, and who knows what else. There is no benefit to me whatever.

11

…and that doesn’t have an option to do the one thing most Google map users use it for (getting directions)…

12

The head honcho at Google Plus just quit, so there might be some shakeups in regards to some of what was going on, perhaps down to the integration of all the other sites in the Google family.

It seems like all the things that I don’t like about Google began during his tenure. It’d be nice if some sense came back into their UI decision making again.