I have a sneaking suspicion that Google is owned by the People's Post Office. Now I know that Google is a work of genius, provides this lovely blog for free, has totally improved our lives and done more for mathematics than even Carol Vorderman reciting Pi to 58 decimal places while wearing nothing but a mortar board could do but is it really that hard for them to test their websites? Perhaps test is the wrong word. Google employs more people with doctorates than any other organisation on the planet. Maybe 'testing' to them means interrogating the code and comparing the speed of algorithms like a high brow game of paper-scissors-stone. Unfortunately most of us speak in a language where words have vowels as well as consonants and we value simplicity above all else. Have you ever tried to contact Google? Their sites (Google Maps, Google Webmaster, Google Adwords) all have links to contact them but invariably link you back to a help page that has no doubt been shortlisted for the Long John Silver Arse Kicking Web Awards for Usefulness. If you do manage to get an email to them you'll get a standard cut and paste reply. We know it's a cut and paste job because half the last sentence was missing one time they deemed us worthy of a reply (and the content is exactly the same every time they do reply).
It's not rocket science to have a website that is logical to navigate (the rocket science graduates are probably not clever enough to work at Google) so please, Sergey and Larry, take a random selection of non-egg heads and ask them to test your websites. I'm not talking window lickers, just everyday computer users who are only interested in what a website can do for them.
New statistics say the heaviest users of computers are now men aged 50+. I suspect many of these are simply unsuspecting forty somethings who went onto a Google help page a few years ago and were unable to find their way out.
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