I first wrote this yesterday evening, but I actually didn't think the really bad experience I had could be intentional. Maybe it was the old XP box with IE8 I was usign at the time? So this morning I tried the same search with Win7 and Chrome. Turns out that the behaviour is the same. Google intentionally got me lost in the woods.
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Heard a comment about something happening to a well known local person but didn't get all of it. Searched Google and for [This Person] and didn't find anything unusual, just the normal stuff about her celebrated self-named business: website, newpaper articles, etc.
So I figured I'd try a News search and clicked on the News tab. This is where it got kind of weird. Unlike when swithcing back and forth between Search, Images and Maps, when you switch from Search to News you have to retype your query.
Some consistency here, big G?
Now it gets really, really interesting. After retyping my [This Person] query*, what happens? I'm looking at a page I don't quite understand. I'm kind of lost and that sure ain't a good user experience.
*and stupidly having to choose "Search news" option as opposed to the "Search the web" option from the dropdown. Really Google? I clicked the News tab in order to -- guess what -- search the @#$%^& news!
The first item on the page is a Search result, followed by a block of a four News results. The rest of the page is filled out with Search results.
I'm not sure what happened and don't know how I wound up with these results. I must have done something wrong. Let me go back and try it again.
I very deliberately repeat the exercise and get the same results. Now I see the red "Search" at the top of the left column. Ah, I thinks to myself, Google apparently thought it could serve me better results by bouncing me out to Search. Okay, I'll buy that.** But then shouldn't I have gotten the same block of news results in my initial search? Weird.
**But let's not forget that I started in Search. Can we say round and round?
But nope, Google didn't actually bounce me to search because, thinking I was in Search I, well, searched. Was quite surprised to see the "Add [this search] section to my Googel news homepage" line.
Just where the heck am I? The top of the left column says Search, but the selected tab is News. Yeah, I confirm that I actually am in News when I use the Define operator in a search and am informed that it's not supported for this type of search.
But the page still indicate I'm in Search and News at the same time.
Oh, and as another nice touch, if in News and you now want to search the web, clicking on the Search tab doesn't carry over the search.
Google, I'm a search professional, one who really takes pride in being able to suss out information on the web. If I had to resort to such a convoluted explanation of what happened during what should be a routine search, well, what can I possibly say?
