[geeks] Google Irritation

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Feb 24, 2009, at 17:01 , Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> Mike Meredith wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:31:36 -0500, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>>> Is there any way to prevent Google from "correcting" my spelling?
>>> I'm trying to search for something, and it keeps searching for what
>>> it "thinks" I'm searching for.
>> That's strange ... it'll tell me that I should really be searching  
>> for
>> what it thinks the word should be spelt as ("Did you mean: Color
>> bits" (bloody cheek ... that's a spelling issue in itself here)), but
>> goes ahead and searches for the "bad" spelling anyway. There didn't
>> seem to be any options to change this behaviour that I could see.
>
> Try searching for "atlast".  8-(

Or try searching for specific word ordering or phrases.

Google search butchers word pairs and even phrases, even if you quote  
them.  It also does stupid things like it will search for your string  
but without regard for spaces, punctuation, etc.  That causes it to  
display results for things not even remotely related to what you want.

I want the damned thing to just search for what I said.

If I search for "join errand" I do not want to see:

	"and join.  Errand"
	"join.  Err and Perr are variables"
	"joiner.  Rand McNally"

...and the other frustratingly idiotic crap Google search does.

It used to work fairly well, but it's getting more inaccurate and  
useless with each passing month.

The problem is the other search engines either suck too, or they are  
woefully incomplete.

There were so many networked hypertext systems years ago that were far  
better than the WWW, and had searching and other needed features as  
base technology.  Instead we are stuck with all this crap, and  
companies make it even worse by taking bad ideas and layering more bad  
ideas on top.

Worse is *NOT* better.

(grumble)

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."