[threeseed]

It is just me or is it a recent change ?

I find Google Search to be incredibly frustrating to use because it chooses to ignore search terms even when pages exist with those terms. Google better be really careful because crippling the experience in order to sell more advertising reminds me why I switched away from Altavista.

[georgemcbay]

Google search for me (and I've been using it a very long time, having been an Internet user since the late 1980s and around when Google first appeared) has generally gotten worse over time, not better. I don't think the changes are to sell more advertising, though, I think they are a combination of:

1) The web is just much bigger and noisier than it ever was. There are so many SEO-bait sites out there now, it is a wonder search still works at all. I can't really fault Google for this part.

2) Changes Google made to make search more accessible to the mainstream user. Google search now tries way too hard to be "smart" about what the user meant to ask for instead of what he or she actually asked for and this can be a huge negative if the person is looking up precise information and knows how to use a search engine.

They somewhat recently added a "Verbatim" option to search that can help you avoid some of this too-smartness, but even with that enabled Google is still inferior to what it used to be when I'm looking for very targeted technical information that I am sure exists out there.

Sadly, this sort of thing is a trend impacting not just Google. The success of Apple has created a culture of creating things for the mainstream consumer user which often comes at the expense of the power user. I get why this is done and ultimately it is the right call for any business that could potentially serve the mainstream, but I do wish more companies would leave in the highly technical expert options as settings for those who are comfortable using them. I feel that in recent times most software in general has swung way too far on the pendulum from being too hard for normal people to use to being totally gimped for experts and feeling like a toy more than a tool and I wish attempts to try to support both sets of users became a "thing" instead of constantly hearing the mantra that "options or settings are bad, no options or settings for you"!

[revelation]

The biggest thing for me has been localization. If you happen to use a localized version of Google, it will heavily favor results in that language, and give you mostly crap when searching for stuff in a different language using the localized search machine (so pretty much all the time for programmers).

Thankfully you can still tell it to use Google.com and in english.

[protomyth]

There are very few things more frustrating then doing a search, opening the resulting page, then search for one of your search terms and find none.

[DanBC]

> Google better be really careful because

Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people.

I used to use + often. We know that the + operator was rarely used, and most of those times it wasn't used correctly. (Of all searches, only 1 in 600 were correctly using the + operator.)

Being outside Google (and not able to see their data) is frustrating, but they have a lot of numbers and they do this stuff because they can show it helps most people.

[OGinparadise]

>>Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people.

Sadly, you are in a minority. Bing's results are excellent for most people. Slap a Google logo and I'm willing to bet that most people wouldn't tell the difference. It's the Google brand that is golden, at least so far. But lately people are talking and questioning their honesty.

[jmillikin]

Bing's own comparison site "bing it on" shows that most users prefer Google's results[1], even though the comparison uses results modified to favor Bing[2].

[1] http://blog.paulnshapiro.com/bingiton-google-wins/

[2] http://www.punditpress.com/2013/02/the-bing-challenge-yes-it...

[OGinparadise]

dear Googler, you made me waste a bit of time: trying to do that by using tweets isn't accurate for obvious reasons. Power user vs normal user, motivation to tweet, bias against Microsoft etc. The other post was confusing as hell, I couldn't make out his point. Absolutely no data, other than suggesting that the poll was rigged. It may very well be.

You may want to check this http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2013/04/... from http://searchengineland.com/users-prefer-google-even-when-15... It's impartial, afaik, and almost 70% like Bing results with the Google logo vs around 30% o Google results with the Bing logo. Amazing since that case shows that people liked the Bing results and had their preferred company's logo on Google. (Not sure if Bing had anything to do with that study though)

Either way, if Bing narrowed the preference to 10%-20%, it's a great feat. Personally I find Bing lacking on obscure terms but most people wouldn't care.

[DanBC]

Well, you missed the point widely.

In my sentence "Google's results are excellent for most people." I could have said "Modern web search engine results are excellent for most people" - I didn't because this is a discussion of how Google (and only Google) is failing for a number of people.