Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it makes people feel better ... It depends entirely on the outcome of the debate.
I'm just speaking personally, but I'm on the side of most of the folks here. A senior engineer is looking into the ["society of spectacles"] search now, for example. What would be most helpful would be constructive examples of bad queries, bad experiences, or concrete proposals for how to improve Google's results page or results UI.
05/23/2011 Search for "tricycline", got 139,000,000 results, mostly spam. Search for "tricycline quack", get results for "tri cyclen" and "ortho tricyclin".
05/23/2011 Search Google Images for "cloudmin screenshots", get 423 results, not a single one is a screenshot of the Cloudmin interface.
05/23/2011 Search Google for "VZManager", get results for "VZAccess Manager", with "VZAccess Manager" hilited in the results as the search term I was looking for.
05/24/2011 Search Google for "480vs factory reset" (need to see if anyone's mentioned how to reset a piece of equipment whose model is "480vs"), get results for "480 vs factory reset", including things like "5970 vs GTX 480 vs 5870". A simple "nothing found" would have been better.
05/24/2011 Try "+480vs factory reset", get a few results from content farms with automatically generated content for longtail searches like this. I know this is a constant struggle for Google, so no points deducted here.
05/27/2011 Search for "rebuild program list start menu", get results from microtrendsecurity.com, a splog.
05/30/2011 Search for "consrv.dll", get results for "winsrv.dll".
06/07/2011 Google product search for "seagate freeagent goflex"; supposedly available for $76, lowest actual base price for any of them is $97.35.
06/29/2011 (I gave up updating the file for a while) Search for "mysql log fail starting" (which was a search suggestion, btw), get results for "mysql log file starting" instead. Also, didn't realize at first that it was giving me stuff I didn't ask for, because of a UI issue: the format of the warning at the top is too similar to the font & size of the search results, so it took me a few clicks to realize what was going on. (Also, I'm an idiot. But, as in this case, I also tend to rely on Google when I'm in a hurry, and I'm more inclined to be an idiot when I'm in a hurry.)
07/08/2011 Search for "mac .ai", keep getting search suggestions for "mac.com...", and if I fat-finger the arrow keys, then I have to go back and fix my search query. Extremely annoying.
07/21/2011 Search for "national instruments compromised", since they were, get results for Ni-Cad batteries.
08/19/2011 Search for "debian Module ip_set not found", get results for ipsec.
09/12/2011 Search for "mountain hardwear shirts", Google thinks you misspelled "shorts". This one got a laugh out of the household. :-)
...This isn't at all an exhaustive list of the Google annoyances I've run across, and it doesn't (mostly) include UI stuff that may be more subjective (like Google Instant, which is just plain miserable on older hardware). I've also edited the tone a lot -- some of these happen when I'm under the gun, trying to get more information on a problem possibly involving downtime somewhere, and that can be a really bad time to have to start fighting with Google -- a tool that, once upon a time, I trusted a lot.
Frustrations with search results similar to the examples here is at least a weekly, if not daily occurrence. When I see cool new Google projects like Google Plus, while search results continue to feel more and more like 1999 Altavista, I stop having warm fuzzy feelings about Google's dedication to search. Intellectually, I know you guys work hard on it, and I know you personally have compared current search results to much older ones, and found the current ones to be much better. But when I search for "shirts" and get results for "shorts" ... it kinda feels like something went wrong somewhere.