[hga]

(Note: I was more referring to the fact that your various offerings are of varied level of quality, i.e. you don't have the laser like focus on remote storage like rsync.net, but your reply was entirely useful anyway.)

I don't worry about that level of quality and have e.g. used Google Docs for some very important things, I worry about the Product Manage level of quality. No in the trenches Google programmer up and decided to remove "+" as a search term (and were mulit-word double quoted phrases previously mandatory search terms?).

There's also the political problems that come with size and scope. Google is in the cross-hairs of many governments, and looking at history you can't say it's impossible that ugly things won't happen, e.g. a split that would put Gmail in a less capable smaller company.

Compounding that, to a degree uncommon in the industry, Google has made an all in bet on the Democratic Party and Blue State values. That strikes me as ... unwise in county that for many years has self-identified to Gallup as being 40% "Conservative", 40% "Independent" and 20% "Liberal".

[jrockway]

To be fair, + wasn't really doing much anyway. I found out the other day that Google's segmentation algorithm is so good that you don't even need to put spaces in your search; searching for "givemealistofsearchengines" does!

[hga]

Well, I was using it!

To be fair, I'm not a normal case, I started creating and querying full text retrieval systems for customers and myself in 1991 when I started my half-decade of document imaging work.

But I did use +, e.g. I'd do a query and get too many or the wrong results because one term wasn't being weighed well and then I'd add a + in front of it. Changing that to wrapping it in double quotes would be only an annoyance if the change wasn't entirely gratuitous (as I understand it) to the Google search function.

And, yeah, the segmentation algorithm is very good, although I haven't torture tested it ^_^.

(Side notes: LinkedIn is the only "social network" I'm likely to use in the foreseeable future, Facebook is anathema (they seem to have inverted your "don't be evil" motto) and Google+ is way too dangerous to use because being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts.)

[icebraining]

being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts

Where did you saw that? According to Horowitz (one of their VPs), it doesn't:

    When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name 
    standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+
    profile are not removed,

[hga]

This would seem to be a change in policy, and "violating the Google+ common name standards" (which I would not have intended to do or likely have accidentally done) is certainly not the only way to get kicked off of it.

The more Google intertwingles their services the more cascading policy "failures" can put you in a world of hurt. Hence my one company, one service policy. In the case of Google (ignoring membership in some Google Groups, but to a non-Google address) it's Google Docs. (I'm not counting the non-sticky ones like search and Maps.)