Kids, skooch closer and let me tell you a story about teh googlez. Don’t make me tell you again, about the skooching.

Anyhoo - it was nigh on aught-eleven when teh googlez decided they would also be the new facebook. After all, facebook is just a simple way to get people to reveal all of their information, and google thought that could be profitable.

So, they created their own facebook - although it truly sucked and wasn’t facebook, it was google in the days when they said “don’t be evil” and so people gave it a try, the tech press wrote many articles, and so on.

It was called Google Plus.

Now, the relevant part of the story we’ll get to (hey! Get back here!) we’ll get to in a second but first you need to know that since the time of caveman search, there has always been the AND operator (also, OR, but that’s for another time.)

Y’see, if I search for Funk, I’ll find things, and if I search for Wagnall’s, I’ll find other things. Neither is likely to be what I want though. But, if I search for Funk AND Wagnalls, bam! There’s the thing I want. So AND is super handy to have for searching.

Now, back in those days, instead of typing out three letters, AND, why, we’d use the plus sign like this, see: + Which was the style at the time.

Now when Google rolled out Google+, it got some initial interest, but then their average user numbers began to slow soon afterwards. So much that it started to be a problem. People wrote about how Google+ sucked. Which hurt the numbers even more.

So. What did teh googlez do? Well! They decided to use the plus sign, +, as a search operator for all the many tens of google+ sites out there. In the process they broke the AND operator. On purpose. For this.

After breaking a key function of their core product, they ignored it for about a year. After that they snuck in a workaround called Verbatim. Then they’d claim people needed to put two terms together in quotes to get AND. It was insanity. It was pathetic.

When DuckDuckGo started to get popular, a lot of us left google for good then. Because of that.

Anyway, they killed Google+ in 2018 and now they’re doing it again with AI. I’d say I care but I hardly ever use them so - whatever.