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am_Unition  ·  3827 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: On Google Plus: "Thanks for nothing, jerkface"

Google+ finally gave me the experience I wanted, I still use it to this day.

It's devoid of enough people that I can post music, links, sometimes even videos of myself, without having to worry too much about all of the social laws that carried over from real life into Facebook. Since Google+ never became a thing, no one ever knew what to do with it, so everyone used it for their own purpose... which was precisely nothing, in most cases. Especially so, after the shitstorm last November (2013) when they put a gun to YouTube's head and said "Google+'s. All o' ye. NOW!". I knew that'd be in the article, hah.

But that's just me, and I'm weird. True, though, there are no excuses for some of the absolute travesties from throttling this down people's throats.

    Google Search is no longer the clean, high-performance tool we once relied on and admired — now it's a fetid stew of Google+-littered, screwed up mystery-mechanics, running under the misguided assumption that anyone and everyone only wants more of their own location, their connections, Google's clumsily guessed interests, and Google+ favoritism in the results served back to them.

To me, that touches on an ideal that I'd like to see realized; an unbiased, standardized search engine... something that Google once performed by default, in it's earlier days as an emerging company. I can somewhat achieve this via incognito mode combined with a VPN service, but still receive results that cater to wherever my VPN server is located. Unless I'm doin' it wrong, you can only change your location for a search, not throw it out entirely. All the new tools are useful, but should always give you the choice to toggle them off.

Driverless cars and other noble pursuits aside, Google is the world's search engine, first and foremost. Unfortunately, it's also a big business now, and big business decisions aren't always centered around user experience. Or maybe the analysts predict an incorrect user experience. Whatever. Big business sucks. The brightest stars implode the fastest.

So uh, anyway, I heard that mk is planning on changing the site design to be just like Digg circa '05. And then integrating with 4chan. I, for one, am stoked, I think it's a solid business strategy.