Image Search - Google, you lost me to Bing. BING!, for Christ’s sake! It’s just awful. On the Android browser, I can barely use Google Image Search on the full (non-mobile) version. Pictures’ thumbnails continually vanish and reload. It’s unworkable – I can’t even view the full size image. Now Bing gets all of my image searches. Your old image search was leagues better.
**Renaming Android Market into Play Store - Blackberry is on it’s way out – even in the lucrative business market which it holds only for its longtime familiarity and (arguably) safer email and message service routed through BB servers. Smart phones for the business world is a new huge market in the next decade, and you relabel your app portal into Play Store? Who are you, Sony? Just awful. There’s really something to be said for professionalism. I know you’re the fun (not-evil) company, but come on. Most of us don’t get to bring our dogs to the office. Would it kill you to figuratively put on a tie and play it a little straight? You’re labeling yourselves as the toy smart phone, and not the business machine that also has Words With Friends (but don’t tell your boss).
**Just Screwing Up a Good Thing - **I used to be able to type in a search term. Search the web, and then click the News tab to see what the headlines are about this search term. Now, that same process takes me to the default News front page and clears my search term. Asshole. I wanted that to be there. This action should be treated as an search, not clicking a hyperlink to load an entirely different page. You already rightfully do this for Images and Maps and YouTube!
**Google+ - **Give me a reason to bother. Give me something exclusive that the others can’t touch, like peer to peer file sharing. Our Gmail storage is already huge, can’t that morph into being able to easily share gigs of content with other G+ friends? You own YouTube, which made - and still makes - its bones on copyrighted content. Open the flood gates.
Yeah, Google really screwed up image search. I don’t know what they were trying to fix, but the results are way, way, way less accurate than they were even a year ago. Bing is now much better.
I totally agree with “Just Screwing Up a Good Thing.” I have no idea why they made that change and it continues to frustrate me every single time it happens. Yeah, it only takes a few seconds to retype your search term but it just doesn’t make sense to do it that way…
Taking away Boolean (+term -term) searching also completely ruined Google IMO. Boolean searches were the bit that made it powerful. They’ve determined, however, that the money is to be made with the morons, not those that “know what they are doing.”
Boolean still works, I just used it. If you search ‘groundhog day’, the movie will be on the first page(4 or 5). Search ‘groundhog day -murray’ and it’s not.
Search ‘groundhog day +murray’ and the movie is the first link.
What I’m hating is the loss of “identical string”. If I want to find “entre Pinto y Valdemoro” (between Pinto and Valdemoro), I don’t want to find every website containing the Spanish word for “and”, nor the tourism webpage for Pinto, I want the specific line!
What he said, except with a qualifier that will probably prompt another gripe…
If you’re logged in to Google, then you need to click the “News” link on the left side, not the top. But if you’re *not *logged in, you need to click on the “News” link not on the very top, but directly under that and the search text-box.
Yeah, they changed that a while back, and it’s weird.
For the longest time Google couldn’t figure out how to handle contacts. They finally upgraded it about a year ago, so it’s no longer buggy and blatantly bad. But, it’s still very weak.
They had to change it from Android Market, because the content grew to include a lot more than just Android-related items.
Play, by definition, defines a lot of what goes on with the Play Store, which includes heavy emphasis on games and music, then movies, TV, books, and magazines. So, at least with the name, it’s very accurate, as these all cater to entertainment…and I’m pretty sure Google is fine with this, as it proves to be just as lucrative.
Interestingly enough, you state that it positions Android as the “toy smartphone” (any more than Apple (not a knock)?), but again, the Play Store is not limited to Android-- it’s merely an offering from Google, which also exist on Android. In addition, they’re already eating into Blackberry/enterprise, so unless the business world really wants to get hung up on the name, they should be able to make the necessary distinctions, or simply use other aspects of the Google suite.
If we’re talking about a legitimate business looking to work with Google products, there are certainly other starting points.
Not sure what’s going on here, but image searches work fine for me. Some of it may be hardware or OS version dependent, but using Chrome, on my Galaxy Nexus, running Jellybean (and in previous versions), image searches are fine, either when launched through the browser, or when using Now.
Can you give me an example of that not working? I’ve not had any problems with it. I put it in quotes, and it either works, or I get a message saying that there’s no exact match and it removes the quotes, which is no worse than getting just getting no results at all.
The only thing that bugs me about Google search is them thinking they know what words I want. The biggest one is when I use the word freeware and it links the word free. The modern word for shareware is now “Free to try,” so i wind up finding mostly shareware. Yeah, quotes work, but it’s stupid of Google to think that anyone wants shareware when they look for freeware.
And most of what bugs me about image search has to do with newer features and how they are poorly implemented. One of the oddest is searching by image. Sometimes you won’t find an image of the size you want in either the “different sizes” or “similar images” categories, but you will find them in the “pages that contain this image.” It makes no sense. If it knows the image is similar enough to be considered the same image in the text results, why can’t it also put them in the image results?
Yeah, I always wondered about that. It’s never made sense to me either.
I’m miffed because Google has hosed my Chrome bookmarks and allows my homepage to be hijacked (for which service they collect a fee from Mi¢ro$oft, I doubt not). I’m getting desperate to find fixes for these problems before I just give up and nuke Chrome.
Did you not read my post, above? Here’s the relevant bit:
…if you want to be able to see the ‘News’ results for the search term you already entered for ‘Web’ search. (IOW, get out of the habit of ever clicking on the various Google services at the very top.)
Still works for me. I Googled “entre Pinto y Valdemoro” (with the quote marks) and every single result on the first five pages (at which point I got bored of checking) had exactly that string in there.
Similarly, Boolean searches still work, it’s just that they got rid of the “+” operator (because of the six people who use Google+) and replaced it with quote marks around the word you want to include.
So it’s no longer “groundhog day” +murray but “groundhog day” “murray”
If you don’t like Google, write to them and ask them to refund the money you paid for their services.
The example was given, I’d searched for entre Pinto y Valdemoro the previous day and the first few hits did not contain that line: they did contain either noun, but not the actual expression - heck, one of them was a Yellow Pages listing (and not even for the city halls of either town, but for a construction contractor called Valdemoro)! Maybe it was a language issue (I often find that I get different results depending on language settings, location and so forth), but still, if I am searching for entre Pinto y Valdemoro, I want to find, exactly, entre Pinto y Valdemoro. I do not want to find any other combinations of the words between the commas unless they are in a page which otherwise contains the exact expression requested.
