Over the last few weeks I’ve been becoming more and more frustrated with Google’s search. It’s only really one complaint, but it’s a pain.
In the olden days, when you searched for words that Google thought you may have misspelt, Google would provide all the matches for what you typed in with, additionally, a link to a search for Google’s spelling correction. That is to say, if I searched for the word ‘stuipd’, it would show me all the matches for ‘stuipd’ with a “Did you mean stupid” prompt.
This was fine.
However, now things have changed a bit. If you search for ‘stuipd’, you get all the matches for ‘stuipd’ and all the matches for ‘stupid’ automatically.
I came across it again yesterday when I searched for ‘schools using Fronter’, and Google decided I meant ‘Frontier’. Which I didn’t. It also chucked up a couple of hits for ‘Fronted’ as well. Rubbish.¬¨‚Ć Turns out now I have to search for ‘schools using “Fronter”‘, with quotes.
Please can we go back to the old way, without Google trying to be too clever?
They broke it ages ago when they made it do “stemming” of words — so typing “fart” would also allow it to find “farts”, “farting” etc.
It’s made it more useful for the general case where people type slightly the wrong thing, but for finding more specific items it’s definitely more painful now.
That and that there are loads of sites trying to work the system to push themselves up the ranking, which they don’t appear to have worked out a way to automatically remove from the index (so it takes a while).