Does Google provide support in this newsgroup? Well whether they do or
not maybe someone here would be able to help me... and if not that,
maybe at least I'll find someone to commiserate with.

I've run some mediumly-complex searches on Froogle and Google Groups
over the past couple days and the results I'm getting back aren't in
keeping with the searches I'm running. For example, I excluded "Nintendo
Straps" with a minus sign in Froogle, and I get search results back that
include Nintendo Straps as product listings.

Then today I do a search on Google Groups with the group: keyword (to
limit the results to newsgroups that have a particular keyword in the
name) and it's not working at all.

I've been trying to log bug reports about this w/ Google itself, but
for all their talk about using open beta tests to generate user
feedback, it is impossible to actually contact them about anything but
adsense online. Has anyone else here run across signs of Google's search
technology breaking down, and even better, do you guys know if there's
anything I can do to fix 'em?

It's as if Google's reverting back to the bad old days of the web, when
you'd search for something and get a trillion results back, none of them
having anything to do with what you searched for.

-Rob