Google is losing it
Google seems to be increasingly focusing on superficial slickness and increased ad revenue, while the actual usefulness of their search engine is decreasing, due to annoying features and dumbing down.
Let me give you an example; last night while searching for book reviews, I typed in "deepsix jack mcdevitt review" (Deepsix being the title of the book I was interested in, note "Deepsix", not "Deep Six"). Now in days of yore, Google would have (and still does in many instances, don't ask me the whys and wherefores) prompted me with something like "Did you mean deep six jack mcdevitt?" and shown me the first two results on those keywords. That's annoying enough (I actually wrote a greasemonkey script to remove those lines), because 99.9% of the time I meant what I bloody well typed in the first place, and that prompt is pointless and a waste of space.
But in this case Google didn't do that, it just went ahead and used its "corrected" keywords. I get "Showing results for _deep six jack mcdevitt review_". And I have to click another link "Search instead for _deepsix jack mcdevitt review_" in order to search for the fucking keywords I correctly entered in the first place. Yes, Google now thinks it now better than I do what I want to search for, to the extent it just flat out overrides my queries. That is infuriating, and I'm on the verge of ditching Google for search because of this kind of crap.