Google really does seem set on a path of self destruction, at least as far as search engine functionality goes. They've changed the way that the search operator 'info:' works, and it's severely damaged the functionality. As regular searchers will know, info:<URL> used to provide you with lots of useful information. You got a link to the cache that Google had stored for the particular page, web pages that are similar to the page, web pages that link to the page URL in question, web pages from the site itself, and finally webpages that contained the URL being searched. You also got a nice little snippet of the page - and that's the only bit that now remains. Everything else has gone. You can still search for the information that you want, it's just that you need to do it in separate steps now, rather than having a nice neat collection all in one place.
It is of course a real shame, and there's no real reason why Google had to do this. The multi-billion company may have felt that it was too expensive to keep the function operational, but that makes little sense to me. I really think that Google simply cares less and less about search. I think they will continue to cut functions because they know that they can. Most people will still use Google because they don't know any different, and as usual it's serious searchers who will bear the brunt of this.
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