The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones?

Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own.

I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.

If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore.

I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.

I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time).

I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?

That was part of the draw of switching to Google way back when. If you had a more challenging search to pull off, you used Google, and eventually it became a habit to just visit Google in the first place.

Now I'm starting to try DDG when Google frustrates me. I also don't need 'Google Power' for a lot of my searches.

It's probably a good thing they're implementing these changes. It makes it easier for an underdog to come in and disrupt their core business, introducing some healthy competition.

Absolutely. And Google have been stumbling hard the past 2-3 years.

but in this case, it probably just means that people were using it like "cookies+cream". they aren't using + as an operator, they're using it as a synonym for "and", and they are better served by google parsing their query as native language instead of parsing it as an expression in a rarely used query language.