25 Things I Hate About Google

Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query, but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)

I had to stop at the 'hate' for cached pages. He doesn't really expand on it at the linked article, either: <a href="http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-moving-forward-in-copyright-battles-229" rel="nofollow">http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-moving-forward-...</a><p>In fact, he does not put forth any argument at all. There is talk of the fact that it was indeed ruled 'fair use', and he essentially just disagrees and considers it evil, and expects that to have some weight.<p>I fundamentally disagree: it is fair use, I have personally found the feature useful more than once, and I really just don't see it as evil. As he mentions, publishers extra-concerned about their content and copyright can opt out; for everyone else, it has let the web be a little more stateful. Letting people disappear controversial content from pages early on in a public backlash just does not strike me as having any benefit.

&#62;<i>Google still does plenty of testing. And we still get messages from people who wonder if they’ve been hit by malware. But it feels like this is happening less. Ideally, the company would regularly advise people of when a test is underway.</i><p>Have they not heard of "New Coke"? Constant, minor flux is accepted much more readily than periods of non-change followed by a big change.

#16 Blogger Being Free<p>The author suggests charging a token amount (eg $1) in order to discourage junk. This would certainly have discouraged me from using my (Blogger) blog to send pictures and news home to family and friends when I go travelling. Not that paying a nominal fee would be a problem in itself. Rather, the administrative overhead of making the payment would have driven me to Wordpress or something else. The cost of making a small payment is not just the value of the payment, it is the cost in terms of time of making the payment and the time spent checking my credit card statement. I certainly can't agree with this suggestion, especially when Blogger has so much competition.

Point #1 annoys me a lot. It would be possible to perform many interesting analyses on your own (think Venn diagrams, association graphs on natural language) if the numbers were accurate. But they are not.<p>I actually heard first-hand from a Google employee an explanation for why these numbers are like that. She said something like, "they are only estimates." Well the point is, if these estimates are as inaccurate as they are, why put them up at all? Doing so is almost dishonest-like.<p>I almost have a feeling (warning: getting into conspiracy territory here) that the search recall numbers are inaccurate on purpose, so that no third-party analytics could be built using them.

I tend to agree. SEO is a disease that makes Google lots of money, but is destroying the ability to find anything. Keywords simply do not work anymore. I have a feeling that there are probably 5-10 startups out there working on this and at least a few are going to come up with some seriously compelling alternatives. The search+ads sector is absolutely RIPE for disruption.

This was a good post. #2 was the most annoying to me. I noticed that the main problem has to do with Chrome remembering your user behavior which affects your results.

One other one. Showing page results that don't have all the words listed on that page that were within my keywords.

What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these flaws?

hate: google places (silly aggregator site hArdcoded into the google serps) hate: google custom seatch api (with a hundred (!!!!) searches free / day) instead of the proper google search api