On Search and spoiled bloggers

I for one appreciate all of the high profile blog posts about Google's recent search quality. Google basically did with search what Microsoft did with IE6. Once they had dominated the market, they figured "Well, that's that, let's make some other cool stuff", and have gone on to enter into all kinds of unrelated markets instead of improving search at all. If you look at improvements to Google's search from say 2004-2010 there is almost nothing new.

Finally once they got a little bit of competition from Bing, we are seeing some new things like instant search, and they are addressing search quality, adding new features etc...

So the point of the blog posting is that instead of deeming the search quality to suck, one might, by having lower standards, not conclude that they suck. In fact much of the article is actually about how blogs shouldn't be filled with fluff, or with bullshit.

Yes.

The contention isn't that search quality sucks - it is that search quality has declined visibly over the past few months. Personally, I find most of the articles maligning Google to be little more than linkbait trying to capitalise on a meme, but let's at least discuss the real issue rather than simply saying "Search is amazing. Now shut up."

"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged." - The Machine Stops.