Amazon MP3 had this issue for me when I was looking for a band called The TV Sound (New Romantic pastiche.) The pages were full of TV soundtracks. Nope, those artists are not called The TV Sound. They’re fuggin’ soundtracks.
But this was not your original point.
Your original point was simply that Google is free, and is the only game in town, so the complaint was “ridiculous.” The fact that you have now changed you argument to address the substantive issues doesn’t change the fact that you started out by threadshitting.
So I’m not the only person who hates Google Instant?
No, but cold +war is the same search as cold “war”.
You could also search for “cold” “war”, which is not the same as “cold war”.
What needs to happen is that all of you stop bickering. Discuss the pros/cons of what Google is doing and how much you like or dislike it, but please! Lay off the sniping at each other.
Ellen
Upper right corner >> Click cog >> Search settings >> Google Instant >> Do not use Google Instant.
It sure is evil that they made you go through all that trouble to turn it off though.
Nope, it [del]success[/del] [del]succotash[/del] [del]suction[/del] sucks.
I wasn’t aware Google ever used search terms.
It’s almost certainly so they can repurpose the + for people search in line with the Google Plus usage.
I didn’t realize Google Instant still existed. I turned that functionality off in “options” within a few days and forgot all about it.
Didn’t realize Google Plus still existed either. I heard a lot on Facebook about people quitting Facebook and making the switch a few months ago, and all of those people are now back on Facebook and not talking about it anymore.
I’ve never liked Google, I just tolerate it.
I miss Alta Vista. Genuine boolean language support.
(until they silently wrecked their own search engine… maybe it’s a disease they get?)
Making your customers do a bunch of extra work to turn off an annoying “feature” is not evil, it’s just bad business. Turn off an easy to use and easy to remember function (+), replacing it with an oddly constructed and non-intuitive function (" ") is bad business too.
Get annoying enough, and folks will start using other free search resources, and whoops, there goes your main source of revenue. You may be the biggest and best game in town, but people are fickle (see Netflix).
As of last month, it would do it in Advanced, too. I’m actually glad to hear this. I don’t do many complicated searches and that one last month had me banging my head against a wall. I thought I was doing someting wrong.
I was looking for a certain type of policy or procedure enacted by a citiy government in one state only. And the answers were all over the place. Different policy types, could be a city or county or agency or company, and any state at all. Hundreds of pages of totally useless. Switching to Advanced changed nothing. Calling out specific cities changed nothing. Just lots of useless.
I felt totally gaslighted.
I hate typing in something, having Google correct it, and then searching for ‘what i meant to say’ instead of what I was actually typing because I hit the ‘enter’ key at the wrong time. This happens all the time on my Droid.
A few weeks ago out of curiosity, I thought I’d Google myself. “**Citizen Pained **gay” was the first suggestion. (Well, my real name, but you know what I mean.)
What the hell? Are my students having fun with me?
I dunno, I actually like the instant search. But it’s so easy to turn it off that if you don’t like it, that’s not much of a complaint.
Oh and sorry for the double post, but it’s not “a bunch of extra work”. It takes literally 5 seconds. 10 if you are really slow.
It takes forever if you don’t know that it’s a changeable setting. That’s the trick, Google’s customer needs to know that it can be changed, and where to change it, to make it go away. Along with the + being replaced by “”, that easy change is not easy at all if you didn’t know about it.
Now, you can puff yourself up and laugh at anyone who isn’t as clever as you, but that’s a very dangerous attitude to take when you’re laughing at your customers.
FTFY:
“Discuss” Google changes -bickering -sniping
…
I use Google extensively in my work–particularly when fact checking–and the ability to include/exclude certain words or phrases is essential (among other things). It’s a small-scale PITA for me to include quotes, and I hope Google receives enough complaints to change it back. If that’s the only change, it’s more shark-toe-stubbing than jumping, but it’s a downgrade nonetheless.
I haven’t had similar experiences to Yllaria yet (and most of my work is in international policy, so I have the issue tenfold), but maybe I just haven’t noticed.
Question: how would I get the following old-school search to work:
*+building “flying flibbertigibbets” “tempestuous teapots” *
I want the results to always include building and have either the phrase *flying flibbertigibbets *or tempestuous teapots.
Is it:
*“building” "flying flibbertigibbets " OR “tempestuous teapots” *
I just tried this and yes, that seems to work. “X” “Y” OR “Z” returned both +X +Y and +X +Z (as well as +X +Y +Z), and each of those three combinations were returned in the first page of results.
There is nothing “bad business” about it…it’s merely a preference you can toggle, via 3-clicks, in a simple list of search settings. Many people actually like the instant feature (though I disable it on my mobile devices).
An inability to turn it off, period, would be bad.
Netflix is an example of an overblown situation that doesn’t reflect the total picture, but Google has actually made a lot of improvements to their search and interface, especially for account users. Their suite of services has been improving, if you ask me.
Of course its not for everyone, so you will always have a flow of people opting to use other search engines/services, while new users will jump on board, in the reverse case.