It's a recurring theme over the last few years, from what I've seen. The search tools for old articles was amazing.

Google Finance was also turned into garbage with their latest "revamp" as well.

Now when I hear Google is going to "revamp" something I'm expecting high odds that I will be frustrated and angry with it.

Its cooperate politics panicking due to the failing of some cobbled together success metric. One of the holy cash cows of the company is inserted into the new product using all the previously gained knowledge- on how to herd holy cows, usually damaging the new product beyond repair.

It fails, the ruin is abandoned and sold off as scrap, and this top down approach to product development is taken as further evidence that the internal innovation culture is deteriorating. Instead, some external company doing a "superficial similar feature" is bought to overcome the perceived deficit. This fails to integrate due to cooperate cultural clashes and architectural differences.

Who would have thought that something like google could be turned into another flailing behemoth, whose management is incapable of seeing potential anywhere besides its core product and the glorious past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC Remember microsofts attempts to cram Windows into everything? Which ironically turned around only after, anything (platform cellphone) was allowed to adapt the holy cash cow to its needs.

Lets take something like Googles AR-Core. If it would show great potential, it will be honored to integrate search into it. And how will that happen? Like search always happened. As a clumsy text-entry or as voice search.

First approach deteriorates the platform (there is no useful keyboard)- second adds no additional value but at least would work.

Truth is, to be successful the core cash cow ("search") would have to adapt to the needs of the new platform. Imagine a NN-net guessing correctly- after you gestured a question mark - not only which trackable you pointed towards, but what the context was and deliver search results situation aware results and suggestions.

Such innovation would force changes upon search- and thus surely would face fierce resistance.

Edit: I apologize for the previous version to any readers. I should stop coding and commenting parallel.