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from the how-about-you-provide-search-results-and-leave-my-system-choices-alone dept.
The Mighty Buzzard (no not our Buzzard, This Buzzard), aka ElReg, reports that Google is serving up ancient renditions of its search engine to users of "ancient" browsers. They also tried this with Gmail, but finally just gave up and refused to support old browsers.
The old version of Search still delivers modern "hits", but the layout is decidedly old school.
Probably as a stunt, or to prevent having to maintain web page code long since obsolete, the search pages are simply rendered in the way they would have appeared when these older browsers were fresh on the scene. The search entry page looks slightly old, (says 2913), but the search result layout is decidedly old school.
Opera 12, Safari 5 are seeing old version, as well as some other older versions of Windows, including ancient IE 6.0
One user posted screen shots on Google Forums. One shot of Google's Image looking like a refuge from the Pleistocene.
Its not that some of these browsers can't handle the newer Search layout. They worked fine until a day ago. Some browsers (Midori) are also getting the geezer treatment even though Midori handles all the latest web technologies like HTML 5 and CSS3, and is based on fairly recent webkit engine, and had no problems rendering Google's search, or even Bing's more intensive image search.
It appears to be just Google's way of saying its time to move on. Maybe it will backfire. I kind of like the old look.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by emg on Monday September 01 2014, @11:54PM
If only they'd give us the old search engine to match the old interface, I'd be happy. Google was much better before they made it 'smart' and it began searching for words that might be vaguely similar to the words you typed in, rather than the words you actually searched for.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:04AM
Google was much better before they made it 'smart' and it began searching for words that might be vaguely similar to the words you typed in, rather than the words you actually searched for.
Use these search modifiers:
intext:word -requires an exact match of "word"
allintext:word1 word2 word3 -requires that all words following allintext: be in the search (words before the modifier are still fuzzy-matched).
Sometimes it is easier to just single-quote, like 'word' and that gets you about 95% the same results as using intext:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @03:50AM
The Verbose option gives you the exact words you request with no monkeying around.
Click that to start or add &tbs=li:1 to the URL.
N.B. They backtracked from a current implementation to try to re-derive the old way.
It is terrible with phrases that use wildcards.
If you use wildcards, then, as the AC said, use the standard search and lots of quote marks.
There's also the "Advanced" Search (which is actually the training wheels model).
http://www.google.com/advanced_search [google.com]
-- gewg_