Google launches Google+ Pages for businesses Google has unveiled some enhancements to Google+ aimed at expanding that people-to-people social networking service to people-to-businesses and people-to-organizations. "So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people," Google's engineering headman Vic Gundotra wrote in a blog post on Monday. "But we want to …
If you do that, you'll find that +specificword (prevents matching against 'specificwords', 'specificwording', etc. but also prevents it searching for 'flute' **instead** of 'lute') has been replaced by "specificword" (double quotes).
The flute/lute thing is the most stupid thing imaginable. I asked goggle to look for information about Renaissance / Early Modern many-stringed instruments, but goggle decided that I really wanted to find information about wind instruments, and NOT information about what I asked for. WTF? I could almost see it offering both in a single search, but ... 'Did you mean ...?' links are annoying because they take up space on the screen, but once in a while I really did make a trypogaphical error, and it's useful then. Completely discarding what I type, aside from a 'we searched for this other thing instead of what you asked for, but here's a link that will search for what you wanted rather than what we wanted' link is unforgiveable.
Sorry, still need to vent.
'I Told You So' -
My comment on that previous article about dropping the '+' -
"It is obviously not easier to use quoted string instead of +string and it is inconsistent with the OR and -string operations.
Google knows a lot about language design and they wouldn't do something so obviously wrong unless they had a better (more lucrative) use in mind for +.
My bet is that they will somehow use + in Google queries to link with Google+ entries and try and drive traffic from one to the other, or more likely both ways."
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