I recall when I switched from Altavista to Google. It was because of Rattle. He saw me laboriously typing in a syntax laden search query and he was like "use this instead" and changed my homepage setting. At first I protested, but he was right. I've been using Google ever since. I use it daily.

I was thinking about this recently, and although I can clearly recall the day he cut me over, I didn't recall exactly why Google was better.

The linked article jogged my memory...

For the first 12 years of its life, Google worked like this: Every term you searched for appeared on every web page in its results. Nerds call this an “and” search — a search for “cherry pie” becomes “cherry AND pie.”

By comparison, the popular convention at the time was to return pages with any of the search terms present — an “or” search. The results were noisy and unhelpful.

Google’s own help page, archived in February 1999, explained it:

Google only supports “and” queries. That is, it only returns pages that include all the query terms. The + operator, which enforces “and” behavior on some search engines, is unnecessary on Google.

At the time, this new feature was a godsend for savvy users.

That's it. That is why I switched. That is why everybody switched.

Since then Google has gone from being a hip little silicon valley startup with a clean website and some open source cred into being a massive corporation that is a veritable threat to everybody's privacy. But their tool is still better than anything else.

Its hard to beat having the right product. Having the right product wins.

But Google doesn't work the way that it used to anymore.

As Google grew in popularity, this didn’t scale...

Google needed to read minds to find what their mainstream audience was looking for, even if it meant ignoring what they actually wrote...

They started with the introduction of spelling suggestions...

In January 2009, however, Google began experimenting with silently ignoring search terms completely.

I have noticed this change. I didn't realize that a change had been made, but over the last few years there have been a number of situations where I got different results than the ones I needed because Google quietly ignores key terms in my search or presents pages that don't contain them above ones that do.

I've started using the plus operator. I use it frequently now. I'm doing what I used to do with Altavista - and I didn't even notice.

But now Google has made things worse - they killed the plus operator!

Unlike their other recent closures, the removal of + was made without any public announcement. It could only be found by doing a search, which advised the user to double-quote the string from now on, making “searches” look like “awkward” “Zagat” “reviews.”

"I'm" "not" "going" "to" "quote" "every" "word" "in" "every" "search" "in" "order" "to" "ensure" "that" "I'm" "getting" "the" "results" "that" "I" "need" "to" "get." "This" "is" "more" "annoying" "than" "AND" "operators."

Its over.

Google is no longer the right product.

Its time to find an alternative.

As Google marginalizes its core base, it’s opened the door for smaller, more nimble startups, such as DuckDuckGo, a one-man project that’s quickly becoming the go-to search engine for discriminating nerds.

Some testing of DuckDuckGo indicates that they don't seem to be doing a great job indexing MemeStreams.

Any other suggestions?