"As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them?"
Heh. I am intimately familiar with the road that leads down...
My first project at Google was the Search Options panel [1]. This was a collapsible left-nav with a bunch of additional tools that you could use to help refine, visualize, or otherwise improve your search results. Many of these tools were very useful to certain populations (one that I worked on was called Wonder Wheel [2] and was very popular with teachers, reporters, and advertisers) and virtually useless to everyone else. Why was this panel collapsible? So that we could offer these features to just those who wanted them without cluttering the UI for everyone else.
Many of these tools got very low usage despite rave reviews. Why? Well, when we interviewed users, they didn't know they existed. On Hacker News discussions I'd direct-link people to a specific tool like custom date range or verbatim mode, and they'd be like "Wow, this is so useful. I had no idea this existed. You guys should make this obvious in the UI."
So my 3rd project at Google, a visual redesign of all of Search [3], included an always-open left nav.
After an initial bump, though, usage numbers for all the tools started dropping off. One interesting effect that you find out, if you do enough metrics-based UI design, is that people become blind to features they don't use. These tools were special-purpose enough that the majority of searchers - who just want to get to their result as fast as possible - were becoming blind to the whole left nav. So the order came down that we needed to hide most of the tools, and only show the ones that we could predict would be likely to be used on the particular query.
Well, we did that, but another principle of UI design is that controls should appear in a predictable order and not move around, so that people can build habits around their use. Changing the set of tools displayed per query violates that principle.
Eventually, after a few more redesigns, the left nav moved to the top nav and most of the tools were discontinued anyways. Many of the features you want actually exist, and I bet you don't know about them. You can get long results through Settings -> Search Settings -> Results per page, for example, and you can prevent Google from inferring what you really mean via Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. But that sorta proves my point, right? You can't really please everyone - even if you build the features they need, there's no guarantee they'll know about them.
Heh. I am intimately familiar with the road that leads down...
My first project at Google was the Search Options panel [1]. This was a collapsible left-nav with a bunch of additional tools that you could use to help refine, visualize, or otherwise improve your search results. Many of these tools were very useful to certain populations (one that I worked on was called Wonder Wheel [2] and was very popular with teachers, reporters, and advertisers) and virtually useless to everyone else. Why was this panel collapsible? So that we could offer these features to just those who wanted them without cluttering the UI for everyone else.
Many of these tools got very low usage despite rave reviews. Why? Well, when we interviewed users, they didn't know they existed. On Hacker News discussions I'd direct-link people to a specific tool like custom date range or verbatim mode, and they'd be like "Wow, this is so useful. I had no idea this existed. You guys should make this obvious in the UI."
So my 3rd project at Google, a visual redesign of all of Search [3], included an always-open left nav.
After an initial bump, though, usage numbers for all the tools started dropping off. One interesting effect that you find out, if you do enough metrics-based UI design, is that people become blind to features they don't use. These tools were special-purpose enough that the majority of searchers - who just want to get to their result as fast as possible - were becoming blind to the whole left nav. So the order came down that we needed to hide most of the tools, and only show the ones that we could predict would be likely to be used on the particular query.
Well, we did that, but another principle of UI design is that controls should appear in a predictable order and not move around, so that people can build habits around their use. Changing the set of tools displayed per query violates that principle.
Eventually, after a few more redesigns, the left nav moved to the top nav and most of the tools were discontinued anyways. Many of the features you want actually exist, and I bet you don't know about them. You can get long results through Settings -> Search Settings -> Results per page, for example, and you can prevent Google from inferring what you really mean via Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. But that sorta proves my point, right? You can't really please everyone - even if you build the features they need, there's no guarantee they'll know about them.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/up-close-with-google-search-opt...
[2] https://www.ppchero.com/how-to-use-google-wonder-wheel-and-r...
[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis...