Dear Google,

In response to your decision to remove user's ability to turn off autocomplete today: SCREW YOU TOO.

I'm a professional researcher. I've tested the differences between you, Bing, and Yahoo (back when Yahoo was independent). There's really no difference in search responses between the lot of you.[1] The main difference is how the homepage works.

Until you do decide to stop cluttering up my screen with extraneous results (I can guarantee you - my searches are NOT going to come up in autocomplete), I'm gone. Even if you give an option to turn it back off; I might not come back.

Seriously. Give me an option to turn off Google Instant (also annoying), but NOT autocomplete? This might make things faster for some people, but I can guarantee you that for this non-casual searcher it makes my job much much harder.

With Annoyance,

Hawk

[1]I have found cases where Yahoo might have an answer that Google doesn't, or vice versa, but that's usually the luck of what was indexed in what order (or not removed from caches yet), not an indicator of who has more search pages.

ETA: I have just discovered you CAN turn it off by using boolean logic - i.e. starting your search with a + or - in front of it. I use that logic in many of my searches. Not going to go back to doing it with Google, though, when if I forget/mistype a + it makes the whole search useless. [And watch them remember that they forgot to remove that feature, and take it away in a day or two, anyway.] Ah, Bing - guess you're my new BFF.

ETA2: Ah. This Google page is now my homepage. No more bloody autocomplete! And as I know that Google tracks everything that goes through it, I'm sure that they're noticing a portion of their users are using this instead.

Until it goes away, I'll stick with Google. If it goes away again, off I go to Bing or Yahoo - whichever is less cluttered.

Tags: google, letters, technology, wtf
Mood: pissed off