Tag Archives: search google yahoo

quality of Google searches?

Question: has the quality of Google search gone downhill in the last few months or is it just me? Every time i search for an event-based thing, i get crap from 2005 instead of what’s relevant now. I suspect that this is because of the blogger impact on event-type items, but it’s really annoying. It’s also annoying that they’ve stopped correcting my atrocious spelling. I mean, it’s all fine and well that lots of people in the blogosphere can’t spell in exactly the same way that i can’t spell, but the #1 type of search i do everyday is spell check. I throw something god-awful like Cziskentmihalyi into the engine knowing that it’ll return Csikszentmihalyi. This still works quite well for names but it’s stopped working for lots of regular words that i just can’t spell to save my life. How pathetic is it that i’ve started opening up Word for the little red squigglies instead of relying on search? Or maybe both practices are weird…

I’m especially irked that when i search for addresses, they almost never come up. This evening, i searched for “1457 Third Street Promenade.” No dice. I added Santa Monica, CA. No dice. I decided to see if Google Maps would find the address and to my shock, it couldn’t find anything and kept giving me just Third Street generically. I went to Yahoo! Maps (which i prefer in old-skool mode anyhow, but hate typing in addresses to as i’ve noted before) and voila, that worked. I still desperately miss the days when addresses just worked in Google. I can’t believe how many times a day i shove addresses into the searchbar.

Maybe i can convince myself to like the Yahoo! UI now that Google has even further screwed theirs up by cluttering the left-hand side. But i still can’t decide… am i just being old and crotchety about change or has Google’s search actually gotten atrocious?

Grr.. or maybe i shouldn’t switch because Yahoo! wants to give me a support group for crotchedy people rather than tell me that the real spelling is crotchety. At least Google tells me that crotchedy is urban slang, making me feel a bit less crotchety.