Glad to hear it. Pain sucks! I've had a terrible two days with arthritis and back pain. Far worse than any I've had before. Makes me want to just curl in a ball in the corner. None of my meds are working to ease it either.

That reeealllly annoys me, aye. Although I kinda have to concede that it's usually right, it's usually me having made a typo and I'm grateful when it catches it. But when it's wrong it still really irritates me for some reason.

As does all that inline searching, inline complete etc. I don't care what other people have searched for but I often want to repeat searches with the exact same wording. And the newer image search is horrible.

I know I can turn all this off with settings and url strings and so on but it'd be nice if they just had a 'google classic' interface with all this stuff turned off.

This! Turn all the shit off and let me know it's available. I am a big boy and capable of turning shit on if I want it on!

I also find the spell correction part very useful. My spelling is usually horrific and I appreciate the Goog's help on that. But it's not perfect and sometimes typing in IT terms or industry specific terms confuses it.

I don't mind it being on by default. I expect people who are new to google and first encountered it like this probably prefer it like this, which is probably most people who use google. It's probably much more convenient on mobile devices too, which surely makes up a significant proportion of usage now.

But yeah, a simple way to have all of it switched off would be nice. And yeah, I'd rather the corrections to my typing remain as a "did you mean" link rather than assuming I meant it (despite the fact that they're usually right).

Shit that sucks mate. Have you been given anything that helps?

I have some meds that help sometimes. Other times nothing helps.

 

I have to get cortisone shots in my back. I was supposed to get them Wednesday and they decided I should try physical therapy first.

 

The thoughts of a needle near my spine is frightening, but being in pain everyday almost makes up for it.

My dad has chronic arthritis in his back and hips not helped by 50 years of building work and lifting heavy patients as a paramedic so I kind of know what you're going through. Nothing much helps him either - tramadol can take the edge off it but the side effects aren't great! Hope you get your cortisone injections soon!

Thanks!

 

There's something to be said for having your health!

>>tramadol can take the edge off it but the side effects aren't great!

 

As demonstrated by Frankie Boyle :|

I'll tell you what really pisses me off with Google...it's that they use your IP/ISP settings to determine language rather than the settings in the browser. Having pages in German (from home) or Dutch (at work, our pipe goes out via the land of clogs-and-shitfood) is quite bothersome.

Well he claims its the constipation erhard the worst part!

 

On a more serious note, I taught a girl who has juvenile arthritis. Loads of operations and a ton of pain every day but she always had a smile for me. Absolute star.

This. I hate this. Stop fucking apologising for Google! :@



For you. It's BAD TYPISTS like you that make them implement the shitty thing, and assume the things I search for are not what I'm searching for - because 90% of the time when it tries to correct me I don't fucking want correcting, and 90% of the remaining time I've already realised and started correcting before the page has loaded, and the remaining 1% of time I could deal with fucking going back and correcting it manually. :@

Yeah, I used to get that when I was on Vodafone 3G - occasionally I'd randomly get the page in Swedish or something.

This is a perfect example of stupid "cleverness" that Google like to do - "hey, lets use our fancy location detection to set the language, we're so clever!".

But the location detection evidently sucks, and - even if it were perfect - it's still wrong to determine language based on location, especially when browsers will already provide the chosen language of the person using it.

I'm not apologising for Google, I don't represent them, I'm just recognising that they are out to make money by being as universal as possible and, given that, I think they've made the right decision in making these things default. The sort of people who don't want them on are the sort of people more likely to understand how to turn them off. That's fine.

I am a fairly bad typist. I'm also bad at spelling and bad at remembering exactly what things were called and so on and 'did you mean...' is useful in all of these cases, some of which I'm sure apply to you as well. Regardless, I'm just saying I'd prefer it to be a link at the top of the search results than for it to assume I'm wrong. But, again, for most people the assuming-they're-wrong approach is probably the right one, because most people are quite stupid.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that this stuff shouldn't be there, if you want to do that then good luck. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be the default, even. I'm just saying it'd be nice if they presented an interface with all this stuff turned off in one go, rather than having to change all the settings individually and then redo that when it forgets what account you're signed in with etc. etc..

On a completely different note, I've noticed Google is actually starting to get a bit shit lately. Searches seem to be overly-prioritising OR results rather than AND results, to the point where I'm having to put plus signs next to every single word in my search (when I can't put it in quotes because I don't know what order the words might appear in). But then I only get results which contain all of the words when what I really want is results ordered by the number of these words they contain, with some balancing as to proximity. Google always used to be really good for this but it seems to be getting worse lately. For the first time in a very long time I think it's possible that someone might come along and outgoogle google. And while it might seem that google is too entrenched... it didn't take long for us all to abandon lycos and altavista and whatever when google came along.

Make a googlekiller, Peter.

Either I'm tired or you're rambling, but in either case there's still one thing I want to pick out of that mess.



There's stupid and there's stupid, and there's also smart-but-hasn't-a-clue-about-computers-so-appears-stupid.

Which isn't a particularly eloquent way of putting it, so I made a picture:



Which is of course a massive oversimplification, but enough to make the point.

Just because a lot of people are stupid and a lot of people can't use computers doesn't mean Google should be dumbed down and made more difficult to use for smart people.

Anyway. You no doubt realise that, and might even pretend that you didn't forget for a moment, but I felt like making a pretty picture. Even if it isn't pretty. Or strictly a picture.

Anyway.

I've also noticed Google's recent shitness with results - I'm actually pleasantly surprised when what I want is in the top five results these days (except when I'm expecting Wikipedia, when I'm surprised when it's not), which is depressing.

But, I can't make a GoogleKiller, because I don't have the resources for that at the moment, and - unless someone randomly surprises me with something in the region of £800k - I wont have them for a long while.

Besides, Google needs to wait until I've conquered Facebook and Twitter. It'll be much easier once I've beaten them. :P

I'm glad it's not just me with the search results. Hopefully someone's doing something about it somewhere.



Why not? Dumbed down just means easier to use and, except in the (many) cases where doing it the hard way has some intrinsic value, surely that's a good thing?

Computers aren't a hobby for most people like they are for us. They don't want to learn things about computers and their applications in order to do the things they want to do with computers. The vast majority of computer users now are like that and for those people the defaults are correct.

I was obviously being flippant with the 'most people are stupid' thing. I don't think intelligence has anything to do with it. I don't really believe in intelligence as an abstract thing at all. I just meant people who, whether because of a lack of interest, lack of skill/ability/aptitude or whatever are not good with computers, which I believe accounts for the majority of people who use them.

There's a difference between making things easy and simple to use, and making things so simple they serve too limited a purpose to be useful.

Google is going in the wrong direction (well, it's not a direction, but anyway), which is a shame because it has so much potential but is wasting it.
Well, unless all that potential was just an illusion from the start. :/ *shrug*

I agree that it's wrong for you and me but for the average user I think it's probably right. Google's business is to cater primarily to those people.

But like I say, they should provide a classic/advanced interface to those who want it, the more 'advanced' users. After all, it's us who'll be the early adopters and evangelisers if something better comes along, so it's in their interests to keep hold of us too. c.google.com would be fine.

I had written a reply, but this stupid fucking android shit did it's crashing trick, and I'm too annoyed to write it again now. :@

(hug)