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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

> trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway.

100% agree. Two small decisions that enrage me for some reason:

1. Stealing the "+" operator away from searches

2. Making Google+ a (semi) closed platform - when I see a link on HN and I click through and it wants me to login to my google+ account just to view the article, I rage inside.

I always want better search, and I've always been happy with google. But now (for many little things like the two above examples) I really want someone else to come along and bring me better search. I don't like google anymore.

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Delete your Google cookies and only log in to Google+ in an Incognito window. Then you won't have the "wants me to login to my google+ account just to view the article" problem ever again.

Or just skip it. If getting there requires manipulating cookies and incognito mode there had better be something special at the other end; in 99.99% of the links to G+ the payoff is not worth the bother.

You only have to delete your cookies once, and the main benefit is not that you can read stuff on G+, but that Google isn't tracking everything you read. As closely.

Yeah, but, there is a better solution, right? Like, Google choosing to not actively break the Web?

If you're enraged over relocating a "+" prefix to a double quoted word, then you might not want to use a post-2005 version of Microsoft Office...

It was not a relocation; + and "" were not equivalent, and Google has made no effort to replace the functionality they removed.

quotes on a single word actually _are_ the equivalent of +, AFAIK. I.e if you want foo, bar, quox to be all present on the page you search, the term is <"foo" "bar" "quox"> (minus angle brackets, obviously)

I could be wrong, but it seems to work for me.

It breaks sometimes.

Imagine the name Dan Northern. I search using (without square brackets)

["Dan Northern"]

I don't ever want, for that search, to see any results like:

["Dan's Northern"]

But I do, sometimes. (Using different names, which I'm not giving here to protect a friend who actually does need protection.)

But Google has a handy feedback form, and I report it when it happens, and sometimes it seems to make a difference.

I would freaking love to see some of that feedback.

I assume you did try the "verbatim" search option, right? (Click "more search tools" if it's not on your screen)

The numbers of people using + operator correctly were tiny. (1 in 600 people.)

If there are 6 billion people on earth, that's 10 millon of them.

The statistic is over the total number of users, not over the total number of human beings, or the total number of human beings that ever existed, or the number of atoms in the universe.

What percentage of the total number of human beings do you think use Google? I'm not even off by a single order of magnitude.

It's good to see a Google manager hold that point of view. Do you have any influence in the organization? Or are mchurch's nightmare demons really running the show?

I've worked on the query parsing code for google.com, and, I promise you, + and "" were equivalent. (Barring unusual edge cases with ambiguous combinations of punctuation.)

Ha.....I agree with you on MS Office!

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