I'm sick of tech companies giving the only way to decline their preferred approach as "maybe later". No, I'm sure I don't want Bing or Edge next month either. If I change my mind I'm perfectly capable of finding the setting and even if I wasn't I'm sure it's only a DDG (or Bing I guess) search away to docs I'm almost certain you will have
Oh yes, I remember immediately googling how to turn this one off. It's a checkbox in settings that's labelled something along the lines of "suggest ways to improve my windows experience"
And how Google degraded their search functionality by removing the + operator (which required that the following word be present in every result) because it allegedly interfered with idiotic "Google Plus." And did they restore it after shitcanning Google Plus? No.
There seem to be a lot of cases where no amount of quote marks will convince them to not match similar words, giving me 5,000,000 results of garbage and none of useful content. Ironically, I suspect some of the things I search were deliberately written with unusual language SO they'd be able to easily searched later.
Also, I've found more and more frequently I get the "there aren't any great results" response from them lately, complete with condescending "maybe search for 'cake recipes' instead" explanation box. Honestly, I'd think if you can find things that they know have few/no results, they should be trying to gain direct feedback-- why are you searching for this, and what could help improve results?
It feels like the dominant market players want to create an illusion of endless depth, and any time where you can actually reach the bottom of the barrel is an embarrassment. So you've got Google chastising you for stumping them, and Amazon giving you 98 unrelated garbage results when there are really only two widgets you actually care about in stock.
Has't worked reliably for me and a number of others for close to a decade I think (the first blog post I know of that mention it is from 2011 or 2013 I think.)
Oh, and I think it is the same thing as others mention in this discussion: infantilization and "we know better than you".
But being Google it might also be just general lack of care.
I need to confirm this, but it looks like they're adding a 5-second delay to the server response time if the User-Agent is a browser they don't like. (Changed the user-agent to Firefox and the delay immediately went away.)
I have known about that for about as long as I've had this problem and I think it used to work back then but today I consider it a purely decorative element.
> I'm sick of tech companies giving the only way to decline their preferred approach as "maybe later".
I've seen this rehashed through the years. Having worked at 4 different tech companies now, I think I can reconstruct why this happens.
UX: "Okay team, here's the opt-in dialog box."
PM: "Wait, the buttons say 'Yes' and 'No.' We don't want people to click 'No' because my perf and promo is tied to the number of people who click 'Yes.' Look, what if they want to change their minds later? Or what if they want to just think about it and then make a decision to enable my team's feature tomorrow? Are we just going to let those numbers slip by?"
UX: "Uh, well, I suppose we could add a third button, 'Maybe later.'"
PM: "THREE buttons?? Are you kidding me? That's too many. Have you even read the book Essentialism, bro? What if they accidentally click 'No' when they really want to just decide later? Or what if we change the feature enough that we can justify prompting them again with the updated version of the feature? If they clicked 'No' then they might feel that we're harassing them or something with another prompt later on."
UX: "Well, maybe we should err on the side of respecting the user's wishes. Sure, we might give up some of the engagement numbers..."
PM: "NNNGNNGGGHHPHHHTHTTTTHHHHHHHH WHAAAAAT!?!? MY BONUUUUUUS"
UX: "Okay okay okay, how about if we just make the 'No' and 'Maybe later?'"
PM: "Hmmm, that's sort of suggestive too. It might make someone who's thinking 'No' to start thinking 'Maybe later' because that's what they read. I like it. And can we make the 'Yes' sound a little less noncommittal while we're at it? Make it a little easier to click on? Maybe something chirpy and agreeable, like 'Sure!' People love being agreeable, don't they? Don't you?"
