Trouble is those preferences disappear—unless you're happy with cookies recording your choices and history—and must be re-entered every time you re-launch your browser and want to use Google. Unless you log into a pre-configured Google account every time you boot up. There's also a difference between using the search box at the top of your browser window—which these settings don't seem to affect—and making the pointless trek over to a Google Search Page where they do. What I want is for Google simply to search for what I ask;
nothing more. Everything they do to 'predict' what I 'really' want has so far proven to be a mistaken, frustrating, dstracting and provincial (dare I say US-centric) distortion of what I'm after.
What we've got is Google trying to become the seamless and ubiquitous background participant in all our web experience so they can sell our eyeballs to the SEO-sites that have gamed themselves to the top of its listings, whether or not they offer what we're searching for. Here's fun: Use Google to try to find forums where people discuss and suggest solutions to Google issues. Just try to use Google's own Help and Feedback options for a truly user-frustrating experience. Their lastest effort to 'simplify and improve' things has been the dumbing of that very preferences page. Just try to find where a Canadian makes sure French citations aren't ignored.
Here's what I'm looking for: An app that might be called GoodGoogle which would launch at boot-up, trash all existing Google cookies and such, go to Google and establish a new account, set to my preferences—no Instant nowhere, each search to cover all western European languages (and to offer Chinese, Japanese and Russian and others as options) and orders the results as I spec, leaving me to get on with my computing day. Is that too much to ask a machine to do for me?
Not that I have any particular feelings on the topic.
