Gransnet needs your thoughts: what do you find frustrating about the internet?

Number one would be my pathetic and very expensive "broadband" (512k) in rural France; though I don't suppose there is much you can do about that. I hate pop-up adverts that cover up what I am trying to read and animated adverts that use up aforementioned bandwidth.
Apart from that it is a bit of a broad question really, but I do like Google's search engine, which seems to get better all the time. The on-line translator is better than many, but still comes up with some hilarious mis-translations sometimes.
Maybe the question needs to be broken down a little?

Fighting my wife for access to the laptop to get online !!!

Pop-ups and smileys are definitely annoying. I understand that advertising funds many things and will happily tolerate 'normal' advertisements but 'flashing lights / look at meeeeee!' adverts are a turn off.

Can I put in a word of praise for Google? I run several Gmail e-mail accounts and they are blissfully free of rubbish due to Google spamfilters. Keep it up!

Let me think some more - I'm sure that I will find something to be a Grumpy Old Woman about.

I hate flashy adverts that have to load before the page you're wanting to look at arrives
Cookies - need to be deletable
Pop-ups seem to have found a way round the blocker

I'm not sure what Google can do about it but ...

some sites create all-singing-all-dancing wabpages, just because they can. They have fancy graphics and are all colours of the rainbow. Very nice to look at on the screen but a pain when you want to print them out (especially forms). They tend to be slower to download, too. Sometimes less is more.

When i google something and a million sites come up! I usually go into the ones that have one of those symbols telling me it's a safe site but does anyone really trawl through more than the first few?? Are they set out in any particular order and how does the first one get first place as it were as surely they are going to be looked at more just by virtue of being first. P.S Google is great

On this note! I wonder if anyone has done any market research! Do laptops actually break when you get so frustrated you throw them at the wall, or do they bounce back and hit you on the head?

Just to answer mamanC's query - when I was looking into setting up a website I was wondering the same - how to get to the top of the Google page. There are many online businesses who deal in this - Web CEO is one of them and this is the one I used. The one important point that they help you with is finding the 'optimum' wording which helps in placing your entry in a top position.

I love GOOGLE. Top of my list of points to praise is the tech help available. I am not that clever at the technical side of computing and need things explained in plain language. I Google any faults with computing or 'how to solve problems' and always find alot of help to put things right.

P.S. I meant to mention that I have just changed internet provider and have also set up 2 email accounts with Google - fantastic!

Living in a rural area I do envy the faster speeds available to urban folk. However, rural life has other compensations and BT have now got us fast enough to watch iplayer in real time which is progress.

Get annoyed when a website won't show me anything unless I download a new version of realplayer etc. Life's too short to bother.

Google is great - have tried other search engines but always default back to google. It is usually good at understanding what I am looking for but I do wonder what I miss by rarely going further than page 2 or 3 of about a million.

Advertising that covers up what I'm looking at is annoying - and sometimes I look at what the advertisers have put on my page and wonder why they have put me in their target market, because they've got me totally wrong.

Advertisements

Pop up adverts are a pest and you can't "opt out". Like others I have tried other search engines but usually end up reverting to Google. In rural France I miss the speed we had in England but at least we do have ADSL! not every village is yet covered in France.

I think site developers & advertisers need to think more about the people who actually use their site and view their advert rather than how many bells & whistles they can add to make it look flashy. They seem to forget that not everyone has the fastest most up to date computers and the fastest internet connection. These days there is even more disparity in technology than there used to be.

I used to work from home via the Internet and at that time I had the fastest broadband and a high spec computer. Now I'm retired I can't afford don't need that level of connectivity and I do notice the difference.

If I have to wait for an ad to load then I find it does put me off the product/supplier that is being advertised which surely isn't the aim of the advertising.

"So what do you want fixed on removed from the internet?"

Pornography

Couldn't agree more with senua. Hate pornography and the fact that it's so easily available on the net.

Try using Firefox - you can block pop-up windows. Doesn't work with all of them, they seem to get round it somehow, but it catches most of them.

Sites that require long registration processes before you can do anything. Often they are just collecting the info so you are on their emailing list for marketing purposes. All these organisations think they are at the centre of the customers universe.

Sites that are slow and clunky for those of us without super fast broadband.

The train line for instance - one click! I don't think so. Quicker to walk to the station and back.

And related to registrations - blooming passwords! I have just resorted to starting a spreadsheet so that i can keep of record of passwords, logins, online identities, alternate emails etc. In case you ask it is in cryptic code that only I can understand.

And I was not that keen to receive "xx would like to be your friend" message on Facebook 6 months after they had died!

But in 2 days time we are supposed to be getting BT infinity... It will have taken them 2 whole months to get their sorry backsides around to it. During which time I have had several sets of marketing info inviting me to sign up... My nomination for an inefficient organisation award.

I sent an email asking about the gransnet/google get together and three days later got a 'your email could not be delivered' message

Hate the pop-up adverts but mostly hate looking for dates for events only to find they are out-of-date events. Why are obsolete sites left on the internet cluttering up my searches? Also get annoyed with sites listed as having information about my researched product only to find they don't when I click on them. If a site isn't easy to use and the information I want isn't easily accessed I don't bother - the same goes for sites with background and text colour mis-matches as they are too hard on the eyes
I have just got back from France and need my bed but Gransnet is keeping me up

I hate sites which have a pale grey background and minute text in grey just a shade darker.

Manufacturers put the instructions and ingredients on packaging in the same elegant unreadable combination too. Do they think that because they are young and have 20/20 vision, all their customers do as well?

Do you mean technical things, like access and operating features? Or content like how a page is designed? Or the more philosophical problem like why am I fiddling about with this when I could be doing something more productive?

Pop ups seem to be breeding as ebay user continually having to delete to read info is irritating. Anyone else experienced renewing car insurance with Post Office- having no documents-Bank holiday I rang-call centre-all documents online- no mention on renewal docs-telepathy? Still no Certificate of Insurance to tax car- call centre again log on in half an hour! Disconcerting when downloading docs- message says they will not be posted as available on website- handy when you need to make a claim, that was the reason I left Swift and had broken windscreen. Technology may not always be smarter especially if customer not informed

Also illegible security numbers/letters-why? If we need to copy we must be able to read!

If you setup Firefox 4 properly and download their privacy add-ons(all free)
you can stop most pop up adverts. You will of course get spaces on the page where the adverts would have been but if you want to see them you can click on "temporary allow" in options.