(I'm one of your users) This was a lot of fun, and it's ruined now.

Seriously, why don't you let people do this?

Handling URLs with multiple slashes in them is tricky, lots of websites silently fold them into one and return the same content, so this seems like something we should handle in the same way in search.

Does this explain why Google search results have degraded the last 6 months? I am not trolling -seriously- for me googling first is hardly worthwhile nowadays. A user from the Netherlands. If there was a way to still use the 2009 search index, i would!!

If you want to send me specific queries (the more general, the better) and what went wrong in the search results for them, I'm more than happy to forward them to the team that works on that. I'm [this-user-name] AT google.com

There actually is a way to use the pre-2012 search index!

Just use http://www.google.com/custom I use either DuckDuckGo or this site all the time, I'd probably switch to DuckDuckGo completely if this search would go down.

Lovely but doesn't use an old index. Just searched for the name of an album released in 2013. Usual results.

Nooooooo! I'm going to be curious forever now.