-buy or -shop often helps get rid of shop results but obviously may well filter out a number you would of wanted.
I agree on the review stuff. For years, it was quite easy to google “blah blah review” to get a relevant product review, but the last few months have been getting exponentially worse. Especially for computer hardware, I keep on getting two or three pages of fake review websites 
I’ve thought about all of this the last few days since posting and I realized back when google was the most prosperous and had the most user satisfaction, they didn’t care at all how many businesses they were taking down in the process of becoming who they are now.
For instance they should indeed have a one stop review center for products laced into their shopping indicies and figure out a way to separate that from web results.
and those damn forums that make you signup to see the thread, they should just cut those off, cuz I agree fully they are indeed a pain in the ass! 
Back to what I was thinking about, somewhere along their lines of decision making they changed their tact and decided not to take out other smaller and specific businesses with their own brand of new products. Instead they have moved to do really big and hard to implement things which seem to fail quite often.
I think this is where they began to start losing user loyalty.
I remember this time last decade, everyone was preaching google, and since then we have all gone quiet since everything new they do seems a just a little bit to concerned about or a lot to be concerned about with trust issues. Or you hear about something and everyone seems to have somehow already know about it for quite some time, so it’s not worth talking about.
So instead of going after the smaller businesses, they really changed direction to user targetting.
They put their whole focus on mining us to generate revenue for themselves while going after the bigger not so important user oriented things.
From what I know they are going after itunes next, which might not be such a bad idea, but it is really late.
Maybe it’s the people working for google that don’t have the inspiration the previous generations of people that worked for google had.
I’m pretty damn sure, we all wanted google to just completely take over unbound with the ideologies both the users and google seemed to had shared.
I’m thinking some new societal ideologies based on what we shared before that we can all (remaining google users, not the ones that have left) feel good about so the whole trust thing can be centered.
For instance if they are selling any of my info, I should get at least Half of it, and some decision over the price and what types of info.
even if that’s like half a bit coins worth of monies. That should also have a layer for monitoring so it can’t be gamed.
As they say “share”.
The Internet made google, we use google, which has created google even more, therefore it’s symbiotic.
Businesses pay, users should be paid.
But, from Google’s perspective you’re the product 
I think Google is still the search engine I’d use if I was looking for a search engine.
Don;t Google Google!!!
Yes I have also noticed much worse results the last months.
I sometimes started to use Blekko instead, I´m very impressed with it. Actually its the only search I think rival google or gives better results.
And I have tried lots of searchengines the last few years.
Its very good especially when you are looking for a article about something.
blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t.
web search bill of rights
- Search shall be open
- Search results shall involve people
- Ranking data shall not be kept secret
- Web data shall be readily available
- There is no one-size-fits-all for search
- Advanced search shall be accessible
- Search engine tools shall be open to all
- Search & community go hand-in-hand
- Spam does not belong in search results
- Privacy of searchers shall not be violated
There is also Hakia which looked promising but havnt used it lately…
I noticed it too,
I’m learning basic programming, just try to find blob effect source code via google, but google seems to don’t understand the word blob and think I wanted to write blog… Before there were a button asking if I want to search blob or blog but not now…
When I type ‘blob effect source code’ (without the inverted commas) Google doesn’t try and turn my blob into a blog 
(although it does bring up a few blogger results most of the seem to be to do with blobs.)
Seriously the words used for the search are precised the first interesting link is the 7th, the height one is cool if you want to blob pictures on java…, link nine seems interesting too but lead to a forum without interesting answer.
I know better way to search and find what I want one specific websites but it’s just a quick example, I’m pretty sure that if google didn’t confuse the two words, it can provide more interesting results.
@üav: ahhh, i see the problem. you’re French.
+1 
Bit of both for me:
More Blob than Blog though…
Also why not use a -blog ??
Your google is better than mine !
The problem is that “blob effect” is too bloody vague, and could turn up thousands of completely unrelated results.
What exactly is a “blob effect”? Is it related to audio or graphics? Is it something that generates blobs? Is it some kind of effect that can transform an image into a blobby image somehow? Is it 2D or 3D? Etc.
Whatever it is probably has a specific name, and if you were to search for that specific name then you’d easily find more useful results.
For example, maybe your “blobs” are actually “metaballs”? If so, then there’s plenty of information out there that’s easy to find when you search for “metaballs” or “metaballs source code”.
You simply have to be more specific with your keywords, or more precise with your search modifiers. Google is not a mind reader, after all.
You’re right but I’m french ,
That’s just a quick example that happens to me last week. You can’t deny that google changed my search and tried to read my mind. I prefer having 2 results and then realise that the words I choosed are vague enough or not, than having a teramillion of results that I don’t care, and think by the way that’s google’s fault.
I’m a google noob, what I don’ understand is how it can say it has thousands of results after a search, but only show a maximum of 20 pages or so, how do you get at resuls 5663473753, or is this impossible?
it does not show a max of 20 pages. it just shows you 20 page numbers at the bottom of the page, but the numbers expand when you get to, say, 13 or something. there’s always the ‘next page’ button. it takes some time to run out of Google results unless you do a pretty obscure query.
What I mean is, that it often gives many more results, like 784.000 for Renoise, but I can only see 7 pages (I have set google to return 100 results per page). So what if I’d like to get to result 470.000, it is impossible?
I have now finally figured out what I was trying to figure out that inspired this thread.
which was how to setup a soft access point with ICS on windows 7.
I went through every nook and cranny? to finally come back to using netsh.
Thing that led to the breaking point was finding out an ap cracking tool aircrack-ng has an ability to run as an access point and evil access point with airbase-ng.
I couldn’t figure out how to set that up in windows and google of course was no help, (it told me to run linux) but airbase-ng led me back on track.
Now I’m happy bear. =D