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But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.

I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results.

For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want.

Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.)

Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data.

Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW.

Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more.

I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway.

Matt Cutts wrote a good article about this, BTW: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/

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