[Off-topic] bsimpson1:
I remember a time when searching on Google was completely intuitive: It returned results that contained what I queried, and as long as I was somewhat competent in recognizing the subtle differences between certain word choices, those results were reasonable irrespective of whether I found what I had searched for. Lately Google seems to have set out on the goal of trying to programatically understand language. I completely hate the idea of a search engine trying to decide when the user would like to have words included in the search that weren't explicitly specified. For example: While using the word "love" in any query where the query as a whole is a commonly familiar set of words, such as "I Love Lucy", typically doesn't return any completely irrelevant results as long as you're not as deep into the search results as something like page 607, searching for something like "i love abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" returns a barrage of links with bolded terms such as "Featured Story: Who the hell cares about abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz? I Know I Don't: A blogger's obsession with numbers.. [blah blah]... Top Stories... See More Like This...". I'm sure most of us know that that "like" is a synonym for "love", but I'm also sure most of us are aware that this is only true in certain contexts.

As another example, I remember querying "sed octal permissions pattern matching" and getting tons of results that seemed to suggest I was interested in results pertaining to "grep" and "awk" as well. The whole reason I had been searching for sed is that I was looking to create a script to be run on my router, which did not have the perl regular expressions feature compiled into grep, and awk was completely non-existent. I admit that including results for awk and grep could have been useful to people who weren't aware that they exist, but still, I don't believe pointing out software that provides similar functionality to that of one specified in a search query should be in within the scope of what a search engine tries to provide. Let people search for something like "sed similar functionality" or "alternatives to sed" and learn that, providing they use a decent search engine which doesn't prematurely assume things, there are other ways to go about their problem.

it

Recently, I entered the query "painless knee swelling damage", hoping to gain some insight as a frequent runner into whether or not swelling of the knee is likely to indicate that any significant injury is occurring when there is an absence of any pain. It returned results with things like "painful" bolded as a keyword. Here is a screenshot: WHY? I can't think of any signs more blatantly indicative of something being wrong with the algorithm of a search engine than when it returns the EXACT opposite of what the user has specified in their query. I realize these results don't seem to be the first that it gives, and I could see how it might be understandable for someone to think -- that after all instances of pages which are consistent with the query have been exhausted -- they should begin including things like often-associated words, closely spelled words, and synonyms, but only at the very end of all the legitimately relevant results. As you can see in the screenshot, the bastardizations of the user's query are not exclusive to the last listed suggestions; they're just seemingly tossed in along with the sensible results. It blows my mind that a company as large as Google can't seem to have someone review the validity of the so-often absurd suggestions generated by the search engine, or even better, adopt (or rather, revert to) algorithms that don't assume its users are so incompetent at expressing what it is they're looking for.

If a company were to exist who owned rights to the use of quotation marks, and made money each time someone typed them into a search engine, I'd truly believe that Google is acting in collusion with such a company because I literally have to put (even single) words in quotes, sometimes proceeded by a minus-sign just to avoid Google's outlandish interpretations of what seems like just about anything I search for these days.