One absolutely brilliant thing I used to be able to do with Google was using hyphens.
User-ID would find “User ID” and “UserID” and “User-ID”.
It was such a useful thing.
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I too have noticed that search has gotten really bad. On store sites with thousands of items, it’s often so “helpful” with including additional similar words in the search that your search for a very specific thing has hundreds of incorrect results, and the thing you wanted is usually several pages of results in (if it finds it at all).
If you don’t know the exact words to use, or don’t know the name of something, searching still works to get you in the ballpark (usually), though it hasn’t gotten better with that over time and it still takes effort to parse the results and figure out what it is you’re looking for in that case. But then when you do figure it out, it’s just as hard to find the right result when you search with the specific correct terms!
I’ve noticed that Amazon is good with search, and getting better. Ebay has always been good; it’s obviously dependent on how well-keyworded the individual listings are but it seems to offer actually-relevant similarly-worded results with pretty good consistency, which is important there since sellers will use different terms for the same things.
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I have been spending way too much time since Friday talking to the customer support of one of our vendors.
Them: You can’t use one e-mail for two accounts. You’ll have to use another e-mail address.
Me: the old account is expired. We’re not going to renew it. There’s been a restructure, and we’re all in different departments now.
Them: oh, then we’ll have to send you an e-mail asking for permission to delete the old account.
Me: [approves account deletion]
Them: you can’t manage the account for your organisation. We have no record of you belonging to that organisation.
Me: but I’ve worked here twelve years. And I’ve had an account with you since 2008. And I was in the right org in that account you just deleted. And you let my director delegate admin rights to me from the new account so I could set it up.
Them: well, yeah, that’s all accurate, but we don’t have your account designated with the right organisation.
Me: how did I get delegated if I’m not part of that org???
Them: um, so this is your software broker’s fault.
Me: why??? They set up my director, and your Web site let him delegate to me.
Them:…
So now one of our purchasing people is working up the chain through his contacts. But I’m pretty sure I found a loophole in their business rules.
Which is weird, because surely this is a common use case. Corporations shuffle departments all the time.
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Google advanced search helps a little, but it isn’t perfect.
A research place I once worked had a full time person just doing searches on the early version of PubMed. But she was helping surgeons, who couldn’t be expected to know a search term from a desert termite.
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Amazon frustrates me.
Because of my allergies, I have trouble finding clothing, and can’t find some things in stores. So I search for “100% cotton,” and they give results which include 100% and cotton, but relatively few are 100% cotton. And then order something but due to a mix-up recieve 80% polyester or 2% spandex.
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But that only allows one search term in each field, and only has one usable field which won’t get substituted or ignored. There’s no (“search term” OR “search term”) AND “search term”
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I’m having flashbacks now. If you need me I’m gibbering under my desk.
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Amazon is truly an absolute mess, for this and other reasons. The information for products is not standardized (ebay actually does this pretty well, but it depends on the sellers entering the information, which is optional) and comes from the vendors and Amazon doesn’t seem to make any effort to standardize things. And incorrect information is ridiculously common.
This is all even before you get to the mess caused by third-party sellers.
It’s all odd to me because Amazon could easily afford to hire a few hundred (or even thousands) of people whose full-time job it would be to go through the listings checking for the obvious issues first (like reviews for very different products being merged), look at reviews and Q&A answers that mention if the information in the listing is different from the actual product, look more carefully for the rampant fake reviews, and just massaging things towards some semblance of standardization and completeness of information in general. The work of updating and adding information can be pushed back onto the vendors, the Amazon workers would mainly just need to flag specific things that need to be fixed.
I guess they’ve probably run the numbers on that and decided it’s not worth it, but it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t be able to sell more stuff if they put some small amount of care into making the listings better. As it is you have to rely on the reviews for accurate information, which is absurd considering how obviously easy it is to get fake reviews.
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Update:
Them: [via e-mail] hey, this is just to let you know we submitted a request to delete your e-mail from that old account, like you requested.
Me: [also via e-mail] yeah you already said you did that last Tuesday, and your system is acting like it was indeed done. Please don’t do it again.
This vendor is far bigger and far older than my company. The way they do things is starting to really scare me.
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“scrolljacking web sites” … “scrolljacking = scroll = book = reserve = reservation”
“Here are your results about spider habitats on native American land. Did you mean: Images of L. Ron Hubbard?”
I miss the old boolean and special search operators. Some of the prefixes still kinda work, but they’re much more limited than they used to be.
This reminds me of https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood, particularly the one that started it all Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.
There can be legacy reasons for not allowing multiple accounts per email when they’re treating email as identity (if they allow account recovery or password reset by email, for example). But shared departmental emails like sales@domain.net are super common, and postmaster@domain.net is as old as email itself. Usually it results in a shared account as well, though.
I recently dealt with a bug in one of the systems I work with where everything assumes each user has at least one email, but accounts are pulled from a corporate directory where they’re not required to have an email, so those nulls were breaking things.
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Sure, I’m not especially questioning the logic. But I am wondering why they still count an account that’s expired against a new instance. At minimum, tell me about it in the setup wizard and ask me if I want to delete the old account or provide a new e-mail for the new account.
Don’t make me call tech support, don’t make me have to e-mail a deletion approval to a support rep’s personal e-mail just because there’s no way to proactively tell you we’ve shuffled departments.
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A curious one I just ran into: searching etymology and getting results for origin. I mean, it probably happened because there were few hits, and they are synonyms in a thesaurus kind of way. But in practice one is about the word and the other about its referent, and so never equivalent.
It made me wonder, though. For a question like that I want to know if there are no answers. But besides trying to cover people searching for a wrong thing, maybe the search engineers want to hide when they don’t have anything for you?
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I don’t know, I just can’t navigate the site. I think it’s ignoring phrases. It’s fucking with scrolling. And if I want to check a previous page of results, and click back, I get nothing.
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Like they couldn’t have made this obvious YEARS AGO???
I really dislike this business of having hidden features that no one knows about. No manuals, no effort whatsoever by companies to describe their products. They all depend on “customer forums” they don’t have to fund.
I wonder how many months of my life have been wasted trying to edit on my iPhone and iPad. This alone makes me want to ditch Apple for competing products in the future.
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I got my first iPhone a year ago and this feature made up for a lot of Android conversion frustrations. Especially since I converted because Scrivener isn’t out for Android yet and that’s the main reason for the switch. Thumb-typing is so much easier.
Except for the fact that they did the stupid thing where holding down the backspace goes from deleting characters to deleting words after a few seconds. If I wanted to delete faster I’d use the lovely haptic touchpad to select shit. 
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“If the interface is good it doesn’t need documentation/help files.”
Which translates to:
“Documentation/help files are a sign of weakness and bad design.”
Now, realistically that’s total BS – at minimum, those little animated tours that play when you start something the first time can be incredibly helpful. But certain stakeholders and designers stick really hard to the maxims.
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I put this in Google Translate and it came out:
“If you can’t figure it out, you’re too stupid to be using our fantabulous devices.”
What a stupid concept.
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I’m with you. Users don’t like to have to read through pages of manuals before they can even get started either. But stuff you’d never find in your own should have a help page.
Ubuntu, upon a fresh install, usually gives you a list of the most common keyboard shortcuts when you get started. I like that approach.
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Is it just me, or do some modals give everyone headaches? Unfortunately, using css to block modals breaks a lot of things, and not using css to block the ones which punch me lets sites break my head.
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