Dear Google, Your Search is Sucking
Dear Google,
I've been using your Search for a very long time. I left Alta Vista for you, even though you didn't have advanced operators at the time. You were that good. And you just got better. You added all those little tools like OR and the "exclusion minus" and filter operators like "site:" that enhanced my GoogleFu and let me amaze my friends and co-workers with my ability to find stuff.
Then your search got a little fuzzy, and you got even better. You found "copier" when I searched for "copy", and that was pretty useful, especially when I could say "+copy" when I knew I didn't want "copier" in the results.
But recently, you've betrayed me. Google Search has become so fuzzy that it's almost useless. You try to make "intelligent" guesses about what I want and return pages that are so far off that they don't even include all of my search terms in the first few hits, even though there are pages that do further down the list.
And the plus-operator, that used to mean "search exactly for this word", doesn't do that any more. And putting quotes around a phrase no longer means "find exactly this phrase"... instead, it starts returning hits that not only have the words of that phrase scattered all over the page, it returns pages that don't even have all the words.
Yet your "Advanced Search" form hasn't changed. If I type into the "find this exact phrase" box, I don't get "this exact phrase", I get fuzzy results that aren't what I'm looking for.
Google, you have crippled my Search. You have stolen my GoogleFu by making what used to be predictable tools very unpredictable. You try to second-guess what I really want, and you don't let me clarify when you guess wrong... you just second-guess my clarifications, too.
I never thought I'd say this, but Google, I think it's time I started seeing other search engines. You and I just aren't as compatible as we once were, and I'm afraid that we may not have a future together. I need a Search that works and can do exactly what it's told. You're just trying too hard to guess what I need, and failing to see that I'm telling you exactly what I need in clear, certain terms.
Maybe, if you work at listening to what I have to say, instead of telling me what you think I want to hear, we can save this relationship. Maybe, if you go back to being the Search I fell in love with, this might work out.
But for now, I've got a date with Yahoo! Search. I'll give you a call sometime.