I’ve been experimenting with Google verbatim lately. Hope these operators add a level of usefulness.
If they ever do hire you, bring back the booleans!!
Surely, and I do use it. Old google also did that, and since they changed this everything about google has become less awesome, in steps. First it was search, lately maps has gone to hell.
They’re likely going to go full Yahoo! at this rate.
Since that help section was likely written before this latest change, that would probably explain it. This is a change to the way things work for older browsers. That’s the topic of the post. They changed things. This is what made people angry.
And no, it’s not particularly old
4+ years is old for a browser.
unless you’re one of those sorts of people who thinks anything more than twelve months previous was “a long time ago.”
Way to try to discredit my input. I’ve been on the internet from before most people had a computer in their home. The fact remains that if you’re using Safari 5 then your system is likely vulnerable to any exploits that were discovered in the last 4 years. Thats a shitload of exploits.
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If they ever do, booleans will be my first easter egg just for you Acer 
BTW I agree about the new maps, but you can temporarily or permanently switch back to the classic view using the little 
in the bottom right corner of the page.
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But but but… that would allow you to find what YOU want.
Where is the profit in that?
I have, it doesn’t stick. I have to use the ‘‘maps.google.com/local’’ to get there
I tend to think that trying to reduce the number of folks out there running on browsers that old enough that they might as well be made out of security problems could also be a factor.
What is so bad about 2013 Google?
Excellent news. I Iike having the ‘advanced search’ button right there. Seems any other machine I use it isn’t there.
You know what I used to love about the Altavista? the ‘title:’ operator. Only returned results with the search term in the page title. That simple operator cut out a tonne of chaff.
Edit to add;
If you’re going to use an old browser, use it in a sandbox.
I probably wouldn’t even notice the difference if this was me. Last year’s Google? Horrors!
One of the breakthroughs that made Google what it is was the minimalist front page. I’m not sure why they keep “improving” that.
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Thanks, teapot! Though I do think they’ve made it a bit overly complicated (though power sometimes requires that), and I think someone at Google should put down the thesaurus.
Another vote for ambassador.
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Well, not exactly. There are plenty of rules that say what you can and cannot drive on a highway. Some of those rules (at least where I live) prevent any new car from being built using the same specifications of some popular cars from the past.
But if the highway literally needed at extra lane to support older cars, you can bet that lane would not be built.
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I would also prefer you not to use that old browser.
Oh, and this seems like a good time to mention https://duckduckgo.com
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4 wheels, a mirror, seat belts, and turn signals. That’s the minimum spec for highway travel. You also can’t be distracting to other drivers (which would definitely not work online).
I’d rather not beat the dead metaphor any further though.
- Built a car that is three lanes wide
- Go drive on highway
- That’s fine, right?
Or, back in the real world, how about California emission control?
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Then hand me the whip, because you left out the most important one, minimum speed. 
I remember signs on the freeways where I grew up that posted MINIMUM speeds along with the speed limit. Usually 45. Your 4 wheels, mirrors, seat belts, and turn signals better be able to accelerate to highway speeds. And they still have signs at the entrance ramps telling you all of the motorized vehicles that are NOT allowed on those freeways. Though 2 wheels is actually the minimum. 
That’s a major part of the point: Google aren’t saying a damn thing. When search by image disappeared, I googled* for a clue as to what was going on and didn’t find a thing. And as has been pointed out, the help page hasn’t even been updated.
Surely, Google shouldn’t be relying on independent apologists such as yourself to disseminate this information, they should be announcing it ahead of time, updating their help pages in time with the changes, and putting out statements, not staying as silent as a necromancer brooding in his tower, which is a bad habit they’ve been nursing since they got heavily criticised for capitulating to Chinese censors.
*Irony, I has it.
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I recall discovering some months ago that the browser included in the increasingly-antiquated Nintendo DSi would bring up a uniquely broken version of Google’s Mobile page; I even verified it by changing the User Agent string ( Opera/9.50 (Nintendo DSi; Opera/483; U; en-US) ) in a desktop browser. It is of course quite impossible to update the DSi browser at this point, nor can it feasibly be security-compromised.
Fortunately, it seems to have been fixed.
It’s not 4+ years. It was “replaced” by version 6 two years ago, and version five has gotten security patches within the last year. So it’s two years old, at most. (Unless we want to say that Internet Explorer is a 19+ year old browser, and thus shouldn’t be supported…) This planned obsolescence where everything that’s more than two years old gets thrown out is fucking annoying and completely unnecessary, as this demonstrates, given that they’ve tossed out functionality that existed last week.
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