I use Google a lot with some work I'm doing at the moment and I wonder whether other people experience any problems with it. Any type of problems!
I have really noticed how often it ignores my key words. It keeps telling me, by way of a typological strikethrough on my keyword that is displayed following each result, that it has rejected the relevance of my keyword. I find this fairly difficult to deal with and I'm continually fiddling with Google to get it to respond in the way that I plainly require for it to respond. Listen to what I'm asking you to search for, Google!
There is no Wildcard search operator for Google. It seems like as though there pretends to be a Wildcard operator, but (for example) I can't get Google to recognise an incomplete word with a Wildcard at the end of the letter string. There seems to have been no development of the potential of Wildcard operator. My imagination suggests to me that Wildcard could potentially fill an unspecified gap in a search term, eg. "Wil*rd". But however Google (the company) doesn't seem to think about developing this operator.
Another thing that surprises me is that there appears to have been zero development over the past ten years of the "suggested terms" feature. It works just the same as it did ten years ago. For example: Google does not suggest that other similar vowels might replace those vowels that you have input. Its suggested terms algorithm does not seem "intelligent", but appears to continue to rely on search term patterns that have been input by previous users. How is it possible that Google has not been taught to perform in more intelligent ways?
I think I heard somewhere that there is a "readability" type algorithm involved in Google usage now. It will make judgments about your literacy levels, and return results to you that it judges to be closest to your literacy, based on previous documents that you have viewed. So that say if you are primarily a recreational level browser at home, but an academic level browser at work, then when you are searching for academic articles at home, Google will present you with more recreational level search results, and it will be more difficult for you to find academic results.
In libraries, there is a kind of policy that has emerged over recent years that user borrowing records are not retained unless the library user nominates for them to be retained. This policy was developed for ethical reasons following terrorist strikes in the US - because the library establishment has the philosophy that access to information should be possible without judgment or fear, even if you are reading about bombs. To my knowledge, Google doesn't have a policy such as this.
Don't get me wrong... Google does a lot of stuff that is very useful. But other times I am a bit "suspicious" of the kinds of things that it could be doing. I don't feel like there is any kind of "conspiracy" involved in the kinds of things it's doing - I just think that its priorities are not always very awesome, and I sort of wonder what it is busy with developing, since it appears not to be busy developing those features that I would find truly valuable when I am searching for very specific or more obscure information.
Sorry that this is not highly coherent, I'm just really interested in hearing thoughts of others on Google and the kinds of things that it does. It's such a big part of our lives, but it seems like most people I know don't really think about it, and most seem to just think it's "cool".
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