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June 23, 2013

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Arthur Weiss

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)

harry

yes, you are right, they canceled the function of tilde~. but used it a month ago...

harry

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?

Ruan

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!

Sheila Thomas

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.

Phil Bradley

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

Wichor

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....

Sarah

I've been teaching the ~ option to my students for years and they loved it! What a shame.

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