On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results
neosmart.net
neosmart.net
I have at my fingertips a method of searching the entirety of human knowledge in less than a second for any information I care to think of on a whim.
I remember pre-internet when getting answers to whimsical questions was impossible unless you had a wall covered with reference books or were actually standing in the library.
I don't know how many web sites there are, hundreds of millions by now? Each of which has multiple pages, each page of which contains many potential search results. All of this is searchable in an instant. I have no idea how. This is what Asimov was talking about when he compared high tech to magic.
And all of this is made available to us for free. On every device we choose to use.
To me, being picky about the finer details of what results are returned in an instant, out of billions of possible results, for free is just ungracious.
As the FOSS folks say, if you don't like, feel free to do better...
But I thought people were right to be annoyed when Google took the plus operator away until they said that most people didn't use it, and of the ones who did use it only a third used it correctly. (Something like 1 in 600 searches used it correctly, IIRC).