New Google Groups
groups-announcements.blogspot.com
groups-announcements.blogspot.com
There are times, for instance, where a search for something like "Microsoft" or "Bill Gates" in Google's Usenet archive will return something like 6 hits. Really Google? In the nearly 30 years of Usenet posts you have, only 6 times has Microsoft been mentioned?
It's not that so many posts mention Microsoft that something glitches out and we only get partial results, because the same will happen when I do searches that I know should return just a few hundred hits. They still often only return 5 or 6.
There have been many times when I've been writing a post somewhere such as here or Reddit and recalled some interesting reference from Usenet that would make a great reference but could not get Google to cough it up.
A few days later, I'll have no trouble finding it (and the other searches work again). But invariably it breaks again.
Even worse is Google patent search. Two months ago, after the Gelernter/Microsoft patent decision, I searched for inventions with "ininventor:Gelernter". Nada. Zero. I reported this via http://www.google.com/support/contact/bin/request.py?contact...
I tried it again today. Still broken. And a search for inventor Dean Kamen yields 10 patents, as opposed to 113 on the uspto.gov site.
Is there anybody from Google reading this that has enough influence to at least suggest that these search problems be investigated?
Disclaimer: I used to work in the company that produced the search technology behind it.
They should consider devoting their apparently minimal allocation of engineering time to providing an API, and leave it to those with the time and passion to come up with a modern UI.