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Google user comment in 2000

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41 pointsvijaydev32 comments

With most other search engines, you really need to add a "+" in front of every word in order to ensure that it's actually in the result.

How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.

Completely agree. I really wish there was a way to turn off the presumptions. Usually when I carefully craft a very specific query, I get back a bunch of generic results unless I put in those pluses.

Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly difficult to solve with greasemonkey...

Edit: Here's my attempt: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88d...

Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script.

Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might have to be its own extension...

Sorry, that link should be: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/mast...

Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to all search terms.

This seriously happened?! That's messed up and I didn't even notice, except that my searches have not been as easy and crisp, but I've always blamed that on SEO.

Yeah. There are lots of good examples I come across all the time but because I can't remember them, try something silly like "web bosting". You'll notice words like "boosting" and "boating" are in bold in the 23 million results. With "web +bosting" you get just a few thousand results and "bosting" is in all of them.

(Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)

I quit using Bing forever when it autocorrected "clojure" to "closure" and offered no obvious workaround.

At least it didn't autocorrect to F#, then I'd be suspicious :-).

Try: +clojure

For what it's worth, I've contacted the appropriate people and the Bing speller team has reproed the issue and is investigating. Sorry you ran into it.

I find it annoying with plurals - my business is called Shirlaws, and 'Shirlaw' is a not-uncommon surname, meaning searches and especially Google Alerts are often filled with some guy coming third in a yacht race not information pertaining to my business.

That Google searches ignore punctuation also irritates me. My wife's name is Harmony - also a fairly common word - so searches for her throw up masses of "...live in harmony. Aldridge also thought ..." which are irrelevant.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried" - Winston Churchill.

Yeah, the fact that it searches for terms you don't type in has really been annoying me for a while. You essentially have to put a + in front of every term in a technical search. I have to say, though, it makes sense for non-technical users, who are apt to type in misspelled and suboptimal terms. For the vast majority of users, Google probably knows better than they do what they should be searching for. Also, I think this change may have evolved as a more generic implementation of an attempt at stemming. For example, it makes sense for Google to additionally search for stereos when you enter stereo, and brings, bringing, and brought (and probably brang and brung) when you search for bring.

Another bugaboo of mine, though, is the fact that hyphenating words no longer acts the same as putting them in quotes. Searching for car-stereo used to be the equivalent of "car stereo" — one less character to type. Now Google ignores the hyphens.

I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?

You youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert and have to drink water through a capillary tube...

Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly...

That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.

Gopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid.

When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on.

I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks.

He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.

You mean any colour so long as it was the dingy standard grey, right?

http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.g...

I'm 23, but I still remember fighting with Altavista and Excite to try to get anything even remotely relevant on the web. Google certainly transformed the utility of the web overnight for me.

Don't forget Metacrawler!

and HotBot

And using Netscape Navigator. Remember that one?

I remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.

or DogPile!

Lycos!

Rest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.

I remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)

It must be some kind of z-modem hackery.

(my earliest self explanation for the phenomenon that I too, noticed from a few years messing about on BBS') :)

Man, how on earth did you find this comment?

If you go through the USENET archives with Google Groups you can find some incredible stuff. One of my faves is digging up arguments about how much RAM or hard drive space would exist "by the year 2000." Some people back in the 80s and 90s were nuts spouting "scientific" reasons why 512MB of RAM would be a theoretical maximum and similar nonsense.

I found it from a link in this post - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-h...

Before Google, I remember guessing relevant-sounding URL's just as often as I remember actually using a search engine. Now if I'm looking for Volkswagen, I don't even try vw.com, volkswagen.com, etc. etc.--I just google "Volkswagen".

And you almost have to out of fear of hitting a dodgy site. I don't think it's as much about "before google" and "after google" as it is about how much the landscape has changed in terms of safe browsing. I remember surfing astalavista.box.sk without a care in the world and now I would never risk it (assuming it even still exists).

I watched someone type "youtube" into Google the other day during a company orientation session.

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