No, I do not love Instant Google

I don't love it. I don't exactly hate it, but it's one of those minor annoyances that's getting thrown on top of the "Google search is getting worse and worse". I don't like having the text i'm typing and the screen it's on appear to rapidly change while I'm typing it. It's a feeling of as if I either need to type faster to keep up with all of that, or try to read really quickly in case there's some intermediate page that's actually what I want popping up there. Really, I wouldn't mind going back to that blank page.

What I really hate is having a bright blue box that looks important distract me every time I search now saying "Don't you love us? Please tell us you love us!" I do not. I do not want that when my main goal is just to type a few words in and hope you don't think I'm a fucking moron because I just spelled 'literal' as 'littoral'. I don't need this when there's somewhere else I can go. They might wonder if I'm a moron too, but they aren't as aggravatingly insistent that even after I told them twice, I probably didn't want it anyway. Google used to do that, too, back when it was the only game in town and there was no need for anyone else to come along.

I don't quite get it. Suddenly there's real competition and Google search starts looking like a pile of junk. It's worse and worse every day. Lately half the time the dropdown box gets stuck, sitting there blocking the first search result, you know, the one that Google used to get almost magically correctly relevant, and I have to actually click again to get it. Screw it, I'll live with the slightly less pertinent results if I don't get a bright blue box.

Also, you need fucking fix Image search if you want people to use it. Trying to get to the second or third page by randomly scrolling so that the other 29 pages try to get populated is not working. And I can't imagine what that's like for a slower internet connection. Not that it matters, Bing is kicking your ass in image search right now.

I've tried it a couple of times.

If you are looking for something of something vaguely interesting, it's not too bad. If I am looking for a specific answer to a technical question, I always have to type everything out before finding relevant results and it saves no time.

As for images, I like the thumbnail and viewer they have for the results. Having 30 pages of images which spend all their time downloading and slowing everything down is not appreciated.

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Originally posted by parzival

Also, you need fucking fix Image search if you want people to use it. Trying to get to the second or third page by randomly scrolling so that the other 29 pages try to get populated is not working. And I can't imagine what that's like for a slower internet connection. Not that it matters, Bing is kicking your ass in image search right now.

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Yeah, this is driving me crazy. And the auto-correct thing is annoying. I was just saying that to my husband yesterday, in fact, when I asked him how to spell "monsignor" so I could search on it. He pointed out that google will correct it if it's wrong, anyway, and I'm like, sure, I really want google to be all like, "monseignor?" did you mean monsignor, you DUMBASS?" I'd rather just put it in correctly and not let google feel superior to me.

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Originally posted by parzival

Also, you need fucking fix Image search if you want people to use it. Trying to get to the second or third page by randomly scrolling so that the other 29 pages try to get populated is not working. And I can't imagine what that's like for a slower internet connection. Not that it matters, Bing is kicking your ass in image search right now.

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Yeah, this is driving me crazy. And the auto-correct thing is annoying. I was just saying that to my husband yesterday, in fact, when I asked him how to spell "monsignor" so I could search on it. He pointed out that google will correct it if it's wrong, anyway, and I'm like, sure, I really want google to be all like, "monseignor?" did you mean monsignor, you DUMBASS?" I'd rather just put it in correctly and not let google feel superior to me.

As a perennial weak speller when typing fast, I love that Google tries to correct and offers suggestions. I'm not sure I understand why a useful and helpful tool like this is perceived as a negative. It's not like the pendants in another place pointing and laughing over misspellings and dismissing arguments over said. It is just a auto-tool like spell check in Firefox or Word.

I don't much like the new GIS loading hundred of pics either but more than that I would like the Size selection to include a few smaller than categories instead of just larger than. It would be nice to say less than 400x 400 as an example. There is an exact, but well that is also limited isn't it and of course a dozen larger than options.

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Originally posted by What Exit?

As a perennial weak speller when typing fast, I love that Google tries to correct and offers suggestions. I'm not sure I understand why a useful and helpful tool like this is perceived as a negative. It's not like the pendants in another place pointing and laughing over misspellings and dismissing arguments over said. It is just a auto-tool like spell check in Firefox or Word.

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Pedants. :D

:fist:

Damn you Fach, Damn you!

:D

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Originally posted by fachverwirrt

Pedants. :D

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You're just being pendantic now!

I'm still undecided on instant search. You can turn it off if you're logged in, though. So you don't have to suffer through it. Me, 99% of the time I search through my browser's search bar, which doesn't do this crap. So I'm not as put out as the rest of you. Although I don't really think it's useful.

I hear you guys on the image search thing, though. As I mentioned here. For the record, though, it at least doesn't download hundreds of pics at once -- it only starts downloading pics when you scroll down that far (which, of course, means that it isn't any faster than just clicking "next page", which I liked just fine.)

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Originally posted by What Exit?

As a perennial weak speller when typing fast, I love that Google tries to correct and offers suggestions. I'm not sure I understand why a useful and helpful tool like this is perceived as a negative. It's not like the pendants in another place pointing and laughing over misspellings and dismissing arguments over said. It is just a auto-tool like spell check in Firefox or Word.

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It was never a problem (well, not a problem for me) when it always appeared under the search. If you typed in a word wrong, you'd get "Did you mean monsignor?" (You still get that for some terms, and I think Bing does this normally too). The problem with Google now is that much of the time now, the search results go with the 'correction' by default. And even when you try to click on the alternate, it often still includes the 'corrected' term in the results.

The only way around this is to put quotes around every term, although I'm not sure if nested quotes work for phrases. At any rate, it's not worth my time to do that if I can go elsewhere.

Exy, the problem I'm seeing with the Image Search is that I don't actually get page 2 until every page below has loaded. Or more precisely what happens is this: pages 2+ come up blank. You start scrolling, and all of them change, leaving page 2 blank again. This means you have to scroll a bit more, and do a dance until all the pages come up in order to get it to work properly. That doesn't happen all the time, so it may be a bug, may be browser-specific, or may depend on the image server, but I'm not going to take my chances while Bing's interface is much better.

I hadn't though about using the browser search bar. My only problem is that I have to choose between it and the address bar for space, so it's a little small. But I may use it for now (or Bing starts to do better in terms of relevance).

You can also, at least with Chrome and Firefox, save special search bookmarks that will allow you to search with, e.g., g "my query" in the normal address bar.

Yay! I didn't think there would be a setting to turn off the Insta-Goog, because as far as I can tell, there's no setting to get rid of that damn side bar, or to change the thumbnails for image search results. I've greasemonkeyed away the side bar, and will maybe do the same for the thumbnails. I only get the newer, crappier Google at home; not at work. Maybe because at work we used a browser that's 100 years out of date.

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Originally posted by parzival

At any rate, it's not worth my time to do that if I can go elsewhere.

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True. I've grown pretty wary of Google recently and have decided to avoid it entirely. I need to replace my Gmail now, but Bing has proven to be a fine replacement for most of my search engine needs.

What I don't understand is how, when I add another word to the search terms, there can be more results rather than fewer.

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Originally posted by Baldwin

What I don't understand is how, when I add another word to the search terms, there can be more results rather than fewer.

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I have no idea, but it probably makes Googlewhacking an awful lot easier.