On: Why I Left Google

[brigade]

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

[groby_b → brigade]

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.

[DanBC → groby_b]

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.

[groby_b → DanBC]

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

[DanBC → brigade]

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

[apenwarr → DanBC]

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

[euyyn → apenwarr]

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.

[apenwarr → euyyn]

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.

[Drbble → apenwarr]

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?

[thisisnotatest → brigade]

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.)