I know a little of Google's syntax like the + and " workarounds, but having a literal search as default would be worthwhile for many users. I recall that I switched to Altavista back in the mid 90s because it offered a feature like that.
My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode."
No instant search.
No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search.
No word clustering/auto-substitution.
It would be awesome.
The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search.
Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the search bar there is a little settings menu).
The word clustering and auto-substitution are a real pain in the ass, especially when it keeps coming up with stuff that just isn't right but is more popular. I really can't stand that. I find myself using quoted queries far more frequently than in the past.
2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I care.
It makes me wonder if, perhaps, Google2010 is just Google's New Coke ;-)
At the very least, please give us an "allintext:" that actually works:
absolutely no stemming whatsoever
no "words were found in links pointing to this page" (this is the most infuriating thing ever)
and... no "you're a bot" crazyness (or captchas that normal people can solve...)
For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com.
Extra points if you know what it stands for :)
'Haa men bord chok ket 775' = 'Find motherboard socket 775.'
I would have thought that 'socket' would be a direct English transliteration, and use ซ (s) not ช (ch) though.
Are you in Thailand, Jacques? Also, what makes you think this is such an uncommon phrase? It may not rival English, but there are plenty of Thai speakers out there, in many countries.
I wish.
On google.com it would be an uncommon phrase. On the Thai version of google not so much I guess.
I don't know what that is supposed to be a reference to.
As a proof, search on any seo play company on Alexa around April 2010
Google Image Search also breaks horribly with FF and Ghostery installed.
Google Instant still does horribly at my favorite test search word: Cardinal
Do they know if I'm looking for
a) the bird b) the team c) guy with the funny hat
? A: No.
Too much ambiguity.
I actually tried this search on DDG yesterday while trying some other tests and DDG's results were much more useful IMO.
Something like "view advanced members" or something...