Google is going from bad to worse. They had the option of a synonym search, using the tilde "~" character - so a search for ~beginner would return hits for beginners, tutorial, primer and so on. It was an amazingly useful resource - for obvious reasons. It was one of THE key search functions that I would talk about when training and when using the search engine myself. And they've killed it. It's just gone. A search for ~beginner returns exactly the same results without the use of the tilde symbol.
I have no words left to describe the short sighted stupidity of Google in doing this. They are wrecking whatever useful functionality they had for no good reason. I wonder what's going to go next? It wouldn't surprise me at all if they now get rid of the entire advanced search functionality in one fell swoop. They clearly don't want people to think, or do anything vaguely complicated to make their lives easier.
Google search is continuing to degrade at a frightening rate.
Phil
I agree with you that seeing it go is a sign that "search is broken" (as you said at last year's ILI). I too loved showing the tilde functionality and did use it sometimes. However I suspected that most people didn't when I first heard this.
Dan Russell has apparently confirmed this "Yes, it's been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain. In truth, although I sometimes disagree with the operator changes, I happen to agree with this one. Maintaining ALL of the synonyms takes real time and costs us real money. Supporting this operator also increases the complexity of the code base. By dropping support for it we can free up a bunch of resources that can be used for other, more globally powerful changes." (http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/googles-tilde-operator-no-longer-works.html)
Posted by: Arthur Weiss | June 24, 2013 at 09:22 AM
yes, you are right, they canceled the function of tilde~. but used it a month ago...
Posted by: harry | June 24, 2013 at 09:28 AM
and also, in the advanced search of "any of these words",if Type OR between all the words you want, such as: miniature OR standard, it will go to miniature OR OR OR standard. Why Google has such a stupid bug?
Posted by: harry | June 24, 2013 at 09:48 AM
If you get what your searching for in one fell swoop you spend less time on their site! less time with their adverts and their branding, or am I just being more cynical as the 'average' user didn't use the ~ to search! the loss of a few of us proficient ones vrs more revenue and more hits! so shall go and take off my cynical hat now!
Posted by: Ruan | June 24, 2013 at 09:48 AM
More Google mess - this morning a colleague went to use Google Translate, as she often needs to but today it will do nothing for her as she does not have an account with Google. Looks like more ways of forcing everyone to sign up with Google. She has tried to sign up just so she can get her job done, but an hour or two later, is still waiting for the confirmation email from Google.
Posted by: Sheila Thomas | June 24, 2013 at 12:03 PM
Hi Sheila,
This shouldn't be a problem - just go to http://translate.google.co.uk/ and cut and paste. No login/signup necessary. :)
Phil
Posted by: Phil Bradley | June 24, 2013 at 05:08 PM
I was using the tilde i my google scholar research, but had already found out that it didn't work with OR's, so was not really useful for the systematic searches i was doing, but still.
Stil wondering when they will quit google scholar because of too little use since they dropped it from the homepage menu....
Posted by: Wichor | June 25, 2013 at 04:04 PM
I've been teaching the ~ option to my students for years and they loved it! What a shame.
Posted by: Sarah | July 19, 2013 at 02:02 PM