#3 is certainly bullshit, but Yahoo failed because of #1. Forcing a user to drill down through hundreds or thousands of categories to do a search is absurd, don't you think?
What other buttons do you want?
But for sure Google has crippled its core product. First they removed the + option, which forced the inclusion of words (their excuse was that it "interfered" with their stupid "Google Plus" product which is now gone). Yes you can use "allintext:" but come on. I'm not even sure that's honored anyway.
And the removal of the ability to exclude certain sites from results.
I think the search box was always there, but for some reason it seemed that you needed to select a category...
OK, I just looked up their old layout, and they buried the search bar amongst so much crap that it wasn't clear whether it pertained to the ad or the thing above it, or what... if you even noticed it: https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/longforms/04ILIeAX3JAF...
For output to be accurate, input has to be precise. But there's a trend of dumbing down and minifying interfaces and then tacking AI to guess what the user really means from the little input he is allowed.
It will never work. It can't work. Anyone who thinks this can work is delusional. And with Google it's particularly obvious how stupid the trend is.
Look at the "tabs" Google has for search: all, images, videos, shopping, news, etc. This is things users can input. But wait! What if an user wants news about something? And they have to reach all the way out to the news tab. That's too much for our bubbling moronic users to manage! They can't into computers. They have room temperature IQ. They have never used Google before, so they don't know where the tab is. They probably don't know what tabs or links are either. I know what I'll do. I'll put an AI to reorder the TABS of my users based on their search history, query input, season of the year, and their zodiac sign based on what birth day they used when they signed up for a Google account. That should solve it.
And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes not the second tab and when you want to click the "videos" tab it's sometimes not the third tab.
I think this is very interesting because you have to think. If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not really a complicated thing to program, imagine how hard they are failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine if they are doing to search results the same nonsense bullshit they are doing to the tabs. Just imagine it. It's clear they have absolutely no idea what they're doing with the tabs.
>And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes not the second tab and when you want to click the "videos" tab it's sometimes not the third tab.
I also noticed this; they redesigned their search tabs few months ago and now it's sort of bad and user unfriendly. Sometimes there is "News" tab, sometimes there is no news tab and tabs look all the same and generic(white rectangles with black text).
>I think this is very interesting because you have to think. If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not really a complicated thing to program, imagine how hard they are failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine if they are doing to search results the same nonsense bullshit they are doing to the tabs.
God knows what is in their index and what is not in their index. I think every search engine needs to make its index open and transparent. And yea Google can fail with all sort of things, they are not ubermensch or something like that.
Google's ranking algorithms and search technology are millions of LOC and not even Google engineers know how exactly Google Search works.
What other buttons do you want?
But for sure Google has crippled its core product. First they removed the + option, which forced the inclusion of words (their excuse was that it "interfered" with their stupid "Google Plus" product which is now gone). Yes you can use "allintext:" but come on. I'm not even sure that's honored anyway.
And the removal of the ability to exclude certain sites from results.