The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search.
Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the search bar there is a little settings menu).
The word clustering and auto-substitution are a real pain in the ass, especially when it keeps coming up with stuff that just isn't right but is more popular. I really can't stand that. I find myself using quoted queries far more frequently than in the past.
2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I care.
I can't think of one time in the 100's of times I've used image search that I cared at all about the actual web sites that the images are from. I wish it was even more direct, right to the images, than it still is, with a small link to the site if I'm interested.
I wonder if part of Google's speed increases involve dropping some of the more complex keywords while creating the index so that the search space is smaller.
'Haa men bord chok ket 775' = 'Find motherboard socket 775.'
I would have thought that 'socket' would be a direct English transliteration, and use ซ (s) not ช (ch) though.
Are you in Thailand, Jacques? Also, what makes you think this is such an uncommon phrase? It may not rival English, but there are plenty of Thai speakers out there, in many countries.
Interesting, 1 thing to add on that hypothesis, right around April 2010, Google dropped a lot of pages from its index. That really messed up SEO play companies.
As a proof, search on any seo play company on Alexa around April 2010
My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode."
No instant search.
No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search.
No word clustering/auto-substitution.
It would be awesome.