I find the Google+ spam annoying too, but my pet peeve is the redirects Google put on search results so they can tell which ones you click on. I hate this, first because it feels invasive and second because it noticeably slows things down. Most of the time it's not that bad, but every now and then it adds a second, or 2 seconds, or 5. I got so mad I astonished myself by switching to Bing for a while. And indeed the Bing experience was much faster. I've switched back to Google for now, mostly out of habit. But I've gradually gone from being a big fan of theirs to a grudging captive. Something could jolt me into a different orbit.

There are extensions to get rid of the redirect: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dohbiijnjeiejifbgf...

Thanks! I'm going to give that a try.

Edit: holy shit it works! You just made my internet faster. How did I, or rather everyone, not know about this?

The weird thing is they could use JS to fire an analytics event to avoid the redirect.

That's what they used to do. This being Google, I'm sure they had a good reason for switching, especially to something so corrosive of user goodwill. I've often wondered what that reason is. Anybody know?

Other than the logo, and the bar at the top that says "Join Google+" (which of course, may be a slight annoyance to some people), what difference do you find between the old Maps/Places page for a restaurant and the new "Google+ Local" restaurant page that you're afraid of being confused into landing on? I just checked a local pizza joint while not signed in to Google and those two things are the only things that aren't reviews and information about the place (i.e. the only differences of substance between the new pages and the old Place pages).

This entire page is just...cluttered.

https://plus.google.com/107551444336725915386/about?gl=us...

It reminds me a lot of myspace, actually.

Okay, instead of whining about this, I'm going to look into a maps API client :)

Well if your only complaint is the design of the page (which is a fair complaint, a poor design can def. be annoying), then the whole "stop trying to confuse me into using Google+ when I just want to use Places" of your original comment is sort of a red herring, isn't it? Aside from having the name "Google+ Local", it's essentially equivalent to having the Places page undergo a visual redesign which you dislike.

Google deleted your inbox? Could you elaborate on that?

Sure. I logged into gmail.com yesterday morning, and my inbox was missing. I still had everything that "skips the inbox", like mailing lists, my sent mail was all there, but everything that was in by inbox had vanished.

:(

This actually made me pretty sad.

That is sad. Do you use POP or IMAP with GMail? And do you see anything weird in the "Last Account Activity" link at the bottom of the page?

Also, were the messages merely archived (i.e., moved from Inbox to All Mail), or were they completely deleted (i.e., you can't even find them via the search box)?

I do use an IMAP client (thunderbird) with gmail.

No, no strange activity in that window. I see myself coming out of Black Rock City, and the sparse signal I was getting on Monday as a result of it, but other than that it's just my office.

This actually sounds more like your account got hijacked, or the screen was left up and someone deleted the inbox messages. Try this process to recover messages from the trash: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Can you check for unusual forwarding rules or delegation in settings? As a follow-up, do you use two-factor authentication on this Gmail account?

Also, check your

I didn't use two factor before, but am now. The password I was using was unique, though, and also fairly complex, so I find it unlikely somebody brute forced it.

I tried the link you're suggesting, as well as looking through the trash etc. What seemed very odd to me was that the messages which started in my inbox were missing from he trash, but things that were "skip the inbox" weren't.

Meaning anything I had "trashed" before yesterday was intact.

Again this seems to suggest that the account wasn't compromised, but that I fell victim to some sort of bug. It would have to be a very strange/determined hacker to go through and move my inbox to trash, then go to trash and only remove messages that started in the inbox.

Regarding the messages that used to be in your inbox -- are they gone gone, like you can't even search for them, even with the in:anywhere flag that makes GMail check Spam and Trash?

OH! in:anywhere seems to be finding them!!! Raldi! Thank you!

I searched what I /thought/ was EVERYWHERE yesterday. Thank you thank you thank you!

Is it possible that you accidentally typed *a# into a GMail window? Those are the keyboard shortcuts for "select all" and "move to trash".

Fear of doing that sort of thing has led me to disable GMail keyboard shortcuts altogether on my account. (To do that, press ? in a GMail window and click the link on the second line of the overlay window.)

Very strange; I've never heard of a Gmail issue like this.

Matt, they seem to have re-appeared in the trash!

Yesterday was some very odd behavior, so I must have missed them in the morning.

Basically:

1) I logged into gmail, and saw only one email that I had gotten that morning, everything else was gone. I looked in trash, and the things in it were from over a week ago [I've been out of town at Burning Man for the last week], so things hadn't just been moved to trash.

2) Did the "recover deleted messages" request via google, and a few hours got a response that some things should be restored to "All Mail", but still didn't see much.

3) Now they're back!

This is great! :)

Woohoo! Glad that you were able to recover them!

I added plus.google.com to the list of sites blocked from search results shortly after they started spamming them. Too many results were polluted with google+ above ones I was actually looking for.

Are you talking about the results with little people icons, Search Plus Your World, that match pages in your circles? You can turn off that feature in settings, or at least you once could.