If you assume something ("oh they meant X not Y", then when your assumption is wrong you (Google) just look stupid.

Fortunately, for you, there's a link you can click on that will force the query using your precise search terms, on every auto-corrected search page.

You still get what you want, it's just not the default. And it shouldn't be the default.

Sounds like your problem is crappy UI enforced through attempts to minimize production cost at the expense of enabling the use of the human processing medium to effectively integrate with an electronic device.

My error rate typing on mobile skyrocketed with the loss of haptic feedback.

Don't knock ideals. Most of the world has a vested interest in convincing you they aren't possible. They most certainly are.

Though Google PR is brings up "relevant ads" every time they're criticized for cyberstalking, they seem to care less about relevant search results. They insist on showing me pages upon pages of links that completely disregards my search queries.

When it acts as if I'm wrong, it's wrong.

It's a computer, that's what they're supposed to do. Precision and determinism is what makes them great.

This is like saying if you had say, a pocket calculator but hit a key at an incidental angle and the calculator then presumed you meant the next number over and gave you that answer instead. It's incorrect - that's not what computers are supposed to do.

Optimization exists though, and an interface and search algorithm isn't a simple calculator. Suggesting the correct term when you misspell or mistype something is precision -- it's both identifying the lack of results for your erroneous input, and suggesting the correct input to get the result you're most likely searching for.

That's literally the point of optimization. If Search was still the same as it was in the late 90's, Google wouldn't be able to do half the things it does.

Are you going to make similar gripes about autocomplete, or GPS that reroutes when you fail to make the planned/"correct" turn?

Comparing an intelligent and contextual search interface and result, with simple arithmetic, is a patently false analogy.

That'd be great. The newer half of it is terrible.

> Are you going to make similar gripes about autocomplete, or GPS that reroutes when you fail to make the planned/"correct" turn?

Absolutely valid. I never use autocomplete as it is vapid and incorrect. Also I don't use gps routing because it does this.

The "smart" rotates and "smart" zooms around the screen ignoring my input isn't desired.

These systems presume the user is profoundly, unbelievably stupid and can't, for instance, understand cardinal directions.

It's why when you enter a url like "http://somesite.com.:80/" it will be like "well I think you meant https://somesite.com" and then just ignore all your very explicit protocol and port instructions and whisk you off to an https, even if it's broken and doesn't work or similarly if you explicitly select a subsection of a url that starts at the first character, it will invisibly tact on the protocol to the beginning of your selection to be helpful ... as if the user is helplessly befuddled and perplexed by the protocol syntax.

These aren't optimizations or improvements. They're diffusive and reductive interfaces that disempower the user, they're everywhere now and it's why everything sucks.

Here's what you're advocating for in the physical world - a smart flathead screwdriver that can't be used to pry or wedge anything. In fact, if you try to do that it will have special built in motors and then work against your intentions, wobbling around looking for a flathead screw and then refusing to work if it can't find any.

Presuming the user is a completely incompetent clumsy dumbfuck and ONLY working under that modality is not an improvement. This has somehow become a core design assumption in the SV and it needs to die.

> This is like saying if you had say, a pocket calculator but hit a key at an incidental angle and the calculator then presumed you meant the next number over and gave you that answer instead. It's incorrect - that's not what computers are supposed to do.

This deserves wide consideration. (Replying because hidden upvotes can't convey that.)

Not that I disagree with your calculator example, but "what computers are supposed to do" changed radically when AlphaGo hit the scene, changed some more with ChatGPT, and will rapidly become a meaningless notion going forward.

We don't have to like it, but we do have to accept it.

You can ask absurd things to gpt and it will try to respond to your absurd request.

For instance, I asked it "What year in the 1900s had the most tuesdays" and it spit back a python program that tried to figure it out. On Google, to compare things, I get "1900s" crossed out and the wikipedia entry for the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain as the first result, maybe because it's around dinner time.

The difference here is between that and the "guess what I mean based on crude demographic information and popularity" interfaces that ignore the user's clear intentions in favor of gross statistical markers like how google changes the position of images, shopping, maps, etc in the results based on the query presuming your intention based on crude vague guesses or the search systems that seem to only return 50% of what you asked for and the other 50% is simply what it thinks you want to see instead.

Those are not tools, they are broken trash. It'd be like if you had a knife that randomly turned into a spoon or a fork based on what time of day it is and what room you're using it in.

ChatGPT tried to do exactly, precisely what I said regardless of the fact that there is no answer since it's a list of years and not a single one. It's the "you told me to do X and I did exactly X" interface, the kind you get with a good tool.

Too much software is the opposite - basically as if someone walked up to a dinner machine and said they're vegan or kosher and the machine was like "American male. Eats cheeseburgers. Here's cheeseburger"

These modern systems just straight up ignore you in favor of some "big data" approach. It's trash.

Recently I slept through a silenced alarm on a Saturday because my phone decided that people don't want wakeup alarms on Saturday and Sunday without extra configuration. I had set it Friday night for the next day and it was off by default because of some grand assumption. Asinine... This stuff is everywhere.

Google has been steadily increasing its "fuziness" to the point that it considers words like "motorcycle" and "bicycle" synonyms. It's made it more and more difficult to get the results you're looking for.

They even do it to search terms you put in quotes.

Google’s continued erosion of their core user facing product “search” (the real core product is advertising but that’s not the majority of people interacting with google are interacting with google for… and an argument could be made that googles only real product customers care about anymore is YouTube but the quality of that experience fluctuates wildly depending on how stupid they are being any particular day due to asinine policies and abusive relationships where they seem to desperately want to destroy the goodwill of the creators that upload content like it’s some kind of fetish and they just have to know the creators hate them otherwise the job of working at YouTube isn’t satisfying…) is indicative of a complete failure to care about the core competency of the company… and companies that fail to care about their core competency are rotting hulks doomed to die…

It still does that now if you put your search terms in quotes.

"It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search"

Good job, Goog!

I remember when it was new, and one of the killer features was the dead-simple "innovation" of having AND searches instead of OR. To this day, I think that any search engine that queried based upon the exact provided search terms would eat their lunch. Probably not, but I would like it.

The modern internet is full of hot garbage.

This seems orthogonal to the suggestion. Presumably the search engine would still filter out noise.

However, even if the other poster means they want the raw internet as well, there's no technical limitations preventing search engines from offering a 'filtered' or 'raw' option. They already offer filters based on what you're looking for (books, news) or to exclude explicit results.

Kagi is probably what you're looking for then. :)

https://kagi.com

Everyone knows this? GOOG stock is near an all time high with search being more than 50% of its revenue.

As for why their market share has not degraded as a result, it is likely that the folks currently prosecuting Google for antitrust violations have the best argument for why this might be so.

1. GOOGL is the voting share stock ticker, not GOOG. GOOG is nothing more than class c shares.

2. Search as a line item is more than 50%, but search is not searching, searching itself provides not much value, ads are where Google makes its money.

3. A stock being near all time high has no indication that it's a company that is "swirling the tank". Often a stock does not decrease until after a series of bad earnings/negative outlook. But with that said, there is no evidence at the moment that Google is not doing great.

The SEO attack surface is functionally infinite for AI, and I'm not sure how any search engine is supposed to be good and also have revenue. The only way to make money is to get people to give it to you, and it's hard to imagine a world in which either a) people will pay for the right to use a search engine or b) companies will pay you to rank them fairly.

I think that's their hypothesis either. I don't think it is a coincidence that we are seeing more lines of ads in search results than ever. They are squeezing the cash cow. I don't think this observation is subjective but could depend on your location, do you observe the same?

This has been the trend in so much technology and I think that's why there's such a slow, grinding, complete distrust of Silicon Valley going on. When all this stuff was new and interesting, you did a Google search to find stuff. Sometimes, by law of probability, that stuff was indeed something you wanted to buy. Now, all queries are subject to change so they can put a product that paid them for exposure in front of you, completely irrespective to if that product is relevant to your search or will solve a problem for you. Social media feeds used to be a chronological timeline of things your friends posted; now they are a selection, made by an algorithm you cannot interrogate, of the "most interesting" (judged on metrics you do not set and have no control over) things your friends have posted. Some of them today, some six weeks ago. And, between nearly all of them... is a product that paid for exposure, that is probably at least tangentially related to things you're interested in, but could not be, and more importantly, was not requested.

And, if you make the terrible, awful mistake of browsing any of these sites without an account, prepare for an absolute FIREHOSE of the worst, crummiest, most exploitative, total and complete bottom-of-the-barrel content, the widest possible net designed to ensnare anyone who passes by to watch a marketing grad in his 30's give 500 people in the developing world dental care, or whatever the fuck, set to copyright free music with as many ad placements as they can stuff into the thing.

Increasingly the Internet is not for us, it is certainly not by us, it is simply where you go when you are bored, the only remaining third place that people reliably have access to, and in true free market fashion, it is wall-to-wall exploitation. People selling their bodies because they can't get access to enough money to live, people desperately trying to sell things they've made because time cannot be utilized anymore without a financial benefit if you want to remain solvent, and of course, massive corporations posting billboards large enough to cover the sky, in every direction, every place. A new spot springs up, a new gathering spot that promises to be better, and it gains traction because everyone is so sick of the rest of it, and then in short order once enough people frequent it, the ads go up, the beggars appear, your friends are hidden behind a cylinder of recommended bullshit that surrounds you, and it joins the cavalcade of endless irrelevant nonsense that makes up the spaces you fled, just in time for the next one to pop up nextdoor promising it won't do the same.

God I am sick of the Internet.

Also apologies for the tangent.