[gregcrv]

They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for. One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.

[reaperducer]

One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local"

It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.

Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.

But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.

Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.

[gowld]

How is Google supposed to know which location you want if you don't tell it and you don't want it to guess? It can't customize results just for you and serve bad results to the other 99% of users.

[extropy]

Yes, Google is definately not a keyword search engine anymore, and not a great "question answering" engine yet. Uncanney walley?

[scarejunba]

"whats the movie where all the kids shoot ewch other on an island"

Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale.

"whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif"

Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of.

Pretty good.

"whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics"

Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great.

Google has always worked really well for me.

[hunter-gatherer]

Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.

[scarejunba]

That one showed up as a pop-up box for me and asked me if I wanted to turn on suggestions. I don't think they changed that.