The usability of almost all Google products is on a baffling nosedive. Google search now reinterprets the words searches so thoroughly that my own keywords appear far from the top of the results. "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It misunderstands almost everything I say, and it doesn't tell me what I've just done the way it used to.
There are myriad small examples of this, and I think we've all seen the Google support forum posts where someone has suggested a seemingly obvious fix, and Google ignores it (even as the +1's number into the thousands).
It's incredibly frustrating to have my live absolutely saturated by a company that doesn't seem to care at all how usable their products are.
And don't even get me started on the worst usability disaster of the last 5 years: Material design.
> "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X.
It's probably the phone. Speech recognition is far better on my phone today than it was even two years ago, which makes sense given the strides that have been made recently.
Material has the same issues as any flat design. It doesn't provide affordances[1]. If something is just a rectangle, you don't know whether it's button or not. Sometimes, things look like text but are actually clickable.
There's a Google app (I can't remember which) where a text-entry box is the same color as the top bar. So you just see the red top bar, and then an arrow that indicates "go back". That's it. If you tap the top bar, suddenly a cursor appears, and you realize you can enter text. I constantly find myself confused in Google apps because of that exact issue.
Problems with flat (and Material) design have been written about extensively[2][3][4]. Recently, there was even a study showing that young people are more confused by UIs than they used to be because of flat design. It takes them longer to figure out where to click.
Floating action buttons for me. I can never remember where those bloody things are, because they move around on the screen, and Google does not really care about the contrast to whatever it's floating on, so it blends in with the environment far too well.
I think Google's speech recognition has vastly evolved in the recent two years, in terms of both speed and accuracy.
But I do notice some glitches in search from time to time. Hard to say it is a trend, but sometimes I do feel such mistake should be avoided if it is Google.
The title is hyperbole. Rather that being impossible to search at all, the problem is that "the 'before:YYYY/MM/DD' and 'after:YYYY/MM/DD' terms have stopped working, and it also appears to no longer be possible to search by date."
That said, Google's web interface to Usenet has always been garbage compared to the standalone news readers of even 20 years ago. I've long wondered when the day would come that Google stopped seeing it worth their bother to maintain their Usenet archive. Hopefully when that day comes they'll donate it to a more capable institution.
They've spent a lot of effort on improving playback and media discovery, and on the contrary, I've heard a lot of positives.
If there's some specific or large deviation from their mission that you perceive from their re-design, I'd like to hear it. I have a great interest in internet preservation, and even though I'm not associated with IA, I would hope to learn more about how people are using the collected work of organizations of the IA and how to better serve those people.
why would you browse to their homepage for that? its exactly why custom search engines exist, and its sure as hell is faster to write "ia ctrl-v" into your address bar than navigating there...
Because it's not default, and learning how to tweak a browser isn't fun to me. I'd rather study history, or how to write well.
I also have an irrational sense that bypassing someone's website is wrong. By avoiding their homepage, I'd also be avoiding their plea for donations, for example. But I realize this is an irrational feeling, and the only reason I'm voicing it is because you asked why I personally won't do that.
One of the reasons date search is almost mandatory for usable Usenet searching is that at this point it's essentially a dead protocol. For nearly a decade now the bulk of what traffic still makes it onto Usenet has been spam and a handful of still active pirate networks.
Without the ability to ignore more recent results, I've found Google Groups search to indeed be completely bloody useless.
But they're not just stopping maintaining it, they're deliberating removing features. So rather than simply doing nothing seems that they are taking an effort to make this archive useless.
One use case for Usenet searches is to see early examples of langues use on the Internet. Without any ability to modify the date this search is impossible.
And really for many searches not being able to likit the date means searching Google's usenet archive is hopeless.
> But while the Internet Archive has a Usenet archive of its own, the two collections in its possession are much smaller—less of a replacement than an alternative to the data Google owns.
I always feel like I missed out on a pretty exciting era whenever I read about Usenet. I envy those who have strong memories around comp.* and wish that I could have been a part of it.
Take reddit and remove all the karma whoring, and you have the Usenet. I think reddit is essentially Usenet 2.0 for all intents and purposes. You get all of the good and bad associated with Usenet, but in a much more easily accessible format.
I disagree. I think reddit is much, much more accessible, and because of that, some of the communities on reddit are thriving in a way that was never possible with the Usenet.
Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.
Don't forget how 64K and 256K DRAM prices fell about ten-fold in a year. I wonder if Apple ever considered stacked 64K DRAMs like the ones used in the PC-AT.
I run a public Usenet node, it's not that hard and is kind of fun: http://csiph.com
One of my goals is to eventually build a web frontend that doesn't suck.. Google Groups is pretty terrible. I would love to find a way to crawl and archive Google's Usenet archive but they rate limited it many years ago. Highwinds/easynews has complete text retention back to 2003 or so, and I think that's the oldest I've seen elsewhere.
I released a SaltStack formula https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd so you can see what an inn config looks like and set up your own. Without peering, it would be a pretty nice way to do company discussion.. new employees can see all the old topics which mailing lists are often not ideal for.
Feel free to PM me for posting access or peering, would be nice to get more discussion and eyeballs in the comp.* space.
What do you mean “its posts were not immediately displayed”? You were always able to see you own posts immediately, and it would take just a few seconds for a post to propagate globally.
it's not just google. it applies to innumerable apps in the App store as well.
The term "upgrade" should only apply to things that have the option to revert back to a previous version. Only then is it a true upgrade, a term supposed to indicate enhancement.