Shakrai's Journal: Has Google Jumped the Shark?

My apologies to the people whom posted in my journal about this previously. My journal entry was disrupted by a few individuals whom apparently have nothing better to do than troll my journal in an attempt to restart old arguments not related to the topic at the hand. That problem has now been addressed and will not be happening again.

The original journal entry was about Google's new "everything" sidebar. You can see an example of that sidebar here. I regard this as as a sad attempt to copy Bing at the expense of the minimalist interface that made Google famous. As yet Google is not providing a way to opt-out of this new "feature". Several people have taken matters into their hands. halcyon1234 posted a greasemonkey script in the original journal entry I did about this story.

I hope that Google does eventually provide an opt-out so such measures aren't necessary. The everything sidebar might be useful for some people but it contributes exactly nothing to the search results as far as I'm concerned. If the comments on Google's forums and other sites are any indication I'm not alone in this belief.

Shark jumped long ago.

[Killall -9 Bash]

Google jumped the shark years ago when they changed the way quotation-mark enclosed search strings were handled. Try searching for an electronics part number some time. I guess Google engineers think there's no difference between a space, and underscore, and a dash.

Google is so intent on appealing to the lowest-common-denominator by having their search engine "intelligently" reverse-engineer what we want to search for to accommodate those without a clue... that they've forgotten that SOME PEOPLE (i.e.

Re:

[nacturation]

they've forgotten that SOME PEOPLE (i.e. the nerds that were using Google when everyone else was still using aol, excite, or alta-vista search) have a clue, and want to EXPLICITLY DEFINE THEIR SEARCH using bools and quotes.

I'm finding I have to put it in quotes and put a + in front (eg: +"search string") just so it doesn't bastardize the quoted term. And even then, it can still be a crapshoot.