[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]really, the first two results, and a side bar have ads. here i gave it 4 search terms, and i know what im looking for, so it made it faster. websites like 2chan, websites similar to 2chan, list of 2chan like sites, and list of image boardsi was looking for the overchan2vfrom the first 3, i decided to try and only use 2chan, a japanese website, to see if i could get to overchan, but from teh first result i learn that 2chan is an image board so i could easily have found what i wanted in 2 searches, and this is something fairly obscure.i find that google is as good as it has ever been, and if you honestly thing that google should be ran for free... i have to ask what drugs you are on that you think an entity that is on its own, in power consumption alone, costs probably 30-40000$ should be free. feal lucky you dont have to pay to use their service.[/citation]
Who said it had to be free? I just said all it finds are paid ads and I find it annoying. The side bar of ads are fine, but google mixes paid ads into your results, it's not just the first 2. The first 2 are just made obvious.
It used to find more relevant sites and now it doesn't. It has been degrading a lot over the last few years. If you haven't noticed then, then maybe you should try searching for something useful.
For example, try finding out how to fix the USB stick not formatted problem in WinXP. All you will find are ancient forum posts from from 2004 or 2005 where retards tell you to uninstall your USB drivers. The newest forum post returned was 2008, yet if you go through the trouble of specifying the last Year, you find several more forum posts on the topic. Why not list the newest first by default?
OR you find paid sites that try to sell you programs to "recover" data from memory sticks. The problem is a common one that can be fixed and a $49 data recovery program is not going to recover shit and rob you of 50 bucks. The average computer user may not realize this.
Something from 7 years ago isn't useful most of the time to anyone unless you're specifically looking for something old. This problem is much more annoying when you need to find something new. Finding stuff from 2004 and constantly having to select newer dates gets annoying (as I stated in my OP). Ironically, 2004-5 was about the time Google gave its best results.
If the search engine was doing a good job, more recent and relevant sites would be found without having to constantly narrow the parameters manually. (I could just use ANY search engine and constantly narrow the parameters to find shit). It doesn't even find the Microsoft support site article on the issue in the first 5 pages, even if you specify WinXP.