Google is awesome.
Well, was.
I am... was, a loyal user. For as long as I can remember, when I had a thought, wanted to know something, needed assistance finding a part for work, or needed to locate anything from the song in my head to dinner in an unfamiliar place, the text that rolled off my fingers was google.com. Old habits are hard to break. But there's a reason I want to break them.
Their products are usually well tested, and nearly flawless. I've been using gmail since 2006. It has the best spam filtration system that I have ever seen. I have converted many a friend from other products to google. Maps are amazing. Earth is a wonderful tool for all sorts of things. I've tried other products here and there, and have loved them whether or not they had any place in my life. This, I think is one of the few companies around today who has gotten most everything right.
But recently, things seem to be falling apart.
I noticed some gradual changes to my inbox in gmail. Okay fine. I'm down with progress. Kinda sucked I can't quickly navigate to my oldest page of messages, but I get it. Trying to integrate the flop "Buzz", I get it, but not for me. "Instant" is pretty cool, unless you have a low bandwidth, or pay by the bit for interwebs. It usually has some pretty asinine (albeit entertaining) suggestions, but I usually type in what I want too fast for that to be a bother. It finds me what I am looking for most of the time. Occasionally, I am searching for something industry related that matches something in another industry, avenue or lifestyle, so I get a surprise now and then. Sometime image searches are funny, because if you search for nearly anything without safe search on, you'll find porn one way or another. Especially in images. But until recently, all of these little quirks is what has given google its character.
The other day, I was looking for some parts for work. I had turned off instant, because it was a slow internet day at work - don't ask. Just know that the internet was being slow. I entered my query, and hit enter, and nothing happened. NOTHING. Maybe a glitch. I hit enter again. Nothing. I clicked on the Google Search button which had recently changed, I believe in conjunction with the release of Google+. There we go. My search came up. Plenty of results, and most of them seemed to be what I was looking for. So I clicked on a couple of links with my middle mouse button as I have done thousands of times before. If you don't know, this action in most web browsers opens the link in a new tab, and leaves your search results right there waiting for you in case that link isn't what you were looking for, you are not forced to re-load your results, and lose your place. I waited a second for the links to come up, and one by one, they failed to load. Weird. I check the tab for the link, and it begins with googleads.sgdoubleclick.net... and trails off with some insane link that I don't understand. All of the special characters are replaced with their html-safe counterparts. I look at the next one. Same thing. WTH? This is weird. Somehow, I muddled through, and found that opening the cached page and clicking on the live link was the easiest shortcut, but that wasn't always available. I figured that there was some glitch in transition, and they'd have it fixed momentarily.
Nope.
Same thing happened the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
It's been what, a month since Google+ went live? I've had the same problem since then. (Wikipedia says June 28th)
I'm sorry, but this is a pain. I have written to google's help several times, expecting some dude on the other end to go, "Doh! I forgot to uncomment some code", and the problem would be fixed. I've written my fair share of HTML, albeit not in many of the more recent, and advanced languages, but damn. How hard is it to make a graphic region part of a submit button, and have it activated with the enter key? Is it so difficult and bandwith consuming a task to pass a link to an application, and open my link for me without the connection timing out stopping the whole sequence? I know you are free, and your business model is such that you're not hurting for money, and while you need all of this information for your data mining, which I put up with, as that's what pays the bills, but shouldn't this be seamless to the user? I am sorry google, but I just can not tolerate this kind of oversight in your inspection processes that let code that creates this behavior go live, and unchecked for so long.
Or maybe I'm the one with the problem. Is my system and usage of your services so distinct or unique as to cause unwanted results that were unforseen? What is going on?
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