Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse?

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I'm hoping to avoid an old-fashioned product-fanboy flame war, but I don't know any other forum that might notice the same things I've noticed.

I am a diehard user of Google Drive, Google Images, Google Search, Gmail, Android/Pixel UIs, etc. But over the past 3 years, I've noticed that these services are functioning more and more poorly, from lagged upload times all the way to increased delays between clicking a button in Gmail and rendering the next object. My Pixel 2 now has so many bugs I can't even keep track of them. The UIs and menus for all of these Google services get more and more hidden, convoluted, and inaccessible with every update. Google Search at this point is a joke, to be avoided unless looking for PDFs.

Am I crazy, or has anyone else noticed this trend over the past few years?

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In my opinion, Google Search is a shell of its former self and its results are becoming increasingly useless for me. It's like the switch to natural language search means that Google fixates on the most generic terms in my query and returns the most generic results - often shopping/blog-spam based. Adding insult to injury, advanced search methods don't seem to work anymore. I have little success when trying to be explicit with quotes and NOT operators. I also feel like I can't trust Google search results because they're trying to tailor them to what they think I want to see. It's troubling that when I tell someone to google something they probably won't be seeing the same results as I do.

And the worst part about this is the fact that other search engines are taking Google's lead and results from alternative engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo are also declining in utility. Does anyone know of a search engine that doesn't use natural language processing?

The worst thing I have seen lately is Google dropping a specific keyword in my search query. They tell you below the search result if they removed the keyword. Or if I search a phone number that is calling me they will drop the last 4 digits. How is that helpful?!?

Never thought it might be related to natural language search buts that’s a good theory.

Try Yandex, I don't know what they're using but they're light years ahead in terms of actual relevant results.

Just tried. First query, results looked good. Second query, captcha.

I recently wanted to search shops in a small French city while being in Finland. Unfortunately the name of the city happened to be very close to a rather common Finnish word (not even really identical). Google insisted to show me Finnish hits, I could not find a way by quoting and adding semi-common French search words to make their algorithms what I want. I could just not get up any reasonable French matches.

Just to demonstrate the effect to myself I took a VPN connnection to France and voilà, very useful hits.

That's the geographic dimension of the search bubble. I am sure there are more.

(I never use Google search when I am logged in to Google and I delete my cookies at least daily. So things should be pretty neutral for me. Someone might say, hah, your fault. If you hadn't subverted their profiling you'd get better results. I doubt that, I had not heard about that French city before and I certainly search more Finnish pages than French ones.)

You could have put a minus sign before the Finnish word; a minus sign before a word excludes this word from the results.

Tailoring Google search queries feels so much like writing Regular Expressions.

The only Google product I use anymore is GMail, and only for one legacy account.

My experience has been that the GMail interface is slow, and I'm tired of it nagging me to install the GMail app. If I wanted to install the GMail app, I'd use my phone, not my computer.

GMail's spam filtering was best-of-class years ago. That's why so many people switched to it. But now it's mediocre at best. I can only shake my head and wonder how some of the so visibly obvious spam messages get through.

In keeping with the spirit of the OP, I'm not going to recommend a better option. They're out there. And with GMail getting worse by the month, it's worth keeping your eyes on the competition to see when you might want to make the switch, too.

Google Search is also supposed to be terrible. I don't use it, but my wife does and she complains about it all the time.

Recently she was searching for information about drinking white wine with beer. It's supposed to be a thing in New Orleans. She wasn't able to find anything but ads and places selling white wine and/or beer.

Right now, searching Google for "white wine and beer" and "new orleans" I get a blog post about Christmas in Australia, "Beer Drinking African American" stock photo, Pinterest spam about beer buckets, and a bunch more blog spam. Nothing useful. I see no reason to go back to Google for anything.

> My experience has been that the GMail interface is slow, and I'm tired of it nagging me to install the GMail app.

Can you describe this more? I'm unaware of any official-from-Google GMail app for desktops.

That's my point. Even though I'm using a computer, every time I log in to gmail, Google nags me to install an app.

What browser and user-agent (https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent) ? Maybe you changed it and forgot to set it back?

I don't change my user agents.

When I google "white wine and beer new orleans" I get this blog post as the top result:

http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/2014/06/boozing-with-brod...

which suggests that besides one line in a movie, this isn't a thing that exists in reality. So... what else should be returned? Other websites that describe how this combination doesn't exist?

what else should be returned?

It doesn't have to return anything else. Just the entry you listed would be fine. But for me, and for my wife, that is not in the results.

Remember that your Google results are not the same as anyone else's. It's spent billions to "tailor" the results for each human on the planet. At the same time, making the results worthless.

For GMail have you tried the basic html view or using a mail client?

Google search has become utterly use less. All the result pages almost contains same result. Let's say 7 years back or so. If you go back to 10th page you could see old results(not the latest one). I actually miss those. Now even if you go for more more more it's almost same results.

So I guess they moved on search engine business. Time to find another search engine, feed their engine with data and see how it goes.

So far no complaints on their other products in GCP platforms or drive or store or firebase or domains or app engine or big query or photos.

Wait browser based photo UI need to be updated seriously. There are so many photos, they could have options to list them up like folders each month and what folder they were from Android like it's downloads, watsapp or camera like seggregate like that, listing them all together in thumbnails in scrolling hell. They need to improve that, I hope they improve before their upgrade next year

No complaints about Photos? Should I remind you that we will not be able to upload pictures in high resolution for free in a couple of months?

-Search within Gmail is atrocious lately. The simplest phrases or words aren't being found, but instead offers up emails that do NOT contain the words!

-Android 11 is the buggiest and least stable version since the early days, with hangs and UI glitches constantly.

-Youtube doesn't let me submit feedback, I actually get a 403 everytime for almost two years, and recommendations have been broken for over 3 years

-Google news only will show 20 articles from the US, and not offer more, despite there being hundreds a day.

Pick a product and there are major issues they just don't seem to care about.

Google search has dropped so much in quality, that it's almost down to where it was before I switched to it. Altavista, Dogpile, InktoMe are no more, alas... I guess I'm going to have to use Bing or Yandex fairly soon if the trend continues.

Lol up until two years ago I thought that Bing was a joke and could be only used to find porn. I have to probably reconsider it and give props to Microsoft in this case.

Google Search has seriously become super bad, unfortunately :(

I use DDG, powered by Bing! I recommend it.

Yeah, I remember when Bing was a joke. Joke's increasingly on Google. Google stopped hiring the best and brightest, and instead started optimizing for maximizing headcount. Product quality followed years later. It's a deep hole to dig out of, and I'm not sure the top knows how to dig in the right direction.

I too use DDG, but usually the results are meh. But compared to Google (now) it is waaay better.

I still miss the "old days" Google though :(

i switched to DDG a few months ago. i liked it initially but lately i haven't been satisfied with the results. the only reason i'm still using DDG is the bangs, colorscheme and vi-keys.

It’s mixed. Existing Google products have become worse. The other problem I think is they don’t seem to persist with their new consumer products to see them mature, Allo, Inbox, hangouts to mention a few. I do like their cloud offerings, Spanner, Bigtable to mention a few.

Till 2015, Gmail and chats let me maintain a responsive conversation on Android. Now email notifications are hit or miss and spam filtering is overzealous. Now I have to nervously open Gmail, wait a few minutes, hunt spam. I could have avoided most Whatsapp and Telegram usage if Gmail didnt become a stressful blackhole. I would have moved a few Whatsapp group to Meetup.com mailing lists!

I would happily go back to the original Gmail interface it launched with in 2004

Not quite there, but the Simplify extension helps a bit:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbm...

It might be subject for some of their services

My Pixel 2XL is the best Google phone I have owned. I am still using it but I will have to replace it soon due to not more updates past December and a broken screen :( I find what I need when using search and Gmail works fine for my personal mail.

But yes Google seems to always hide things that I would think should be prominently displayed

I think they're still great for the most part. I have a Pixel 4 and my partner has a pixel 4a and we're both super happy with it.

Google Search is just as good if not better than a few years ago, but Gmail is getting a little bloated with almost 800mb of RAM taken up per tab.

I think like with everything, they have phases where things are worse, but then they get better. Just like Microsoft had Vista before Windows 7, ME before XP, etc. Products have phases of exploration on how to be more useful, and then they solidify those useful features and deprecate the ones that aren't great.

If you're looking for contrast, the new Apple OS's are also getting way worse (Catalina, Big Sur), but some of the releases (SL) were great. Hopefully we're on the edge of them getting better again.

I would like to offer an alternate opinion, since this has become a Google bashing thread. Google Chrome is one of the products I love the most as a developer. The number of standards/experimental features that are launched in Chrome boggles my mind. Microsoft Edge plays catch up, but Safari doesn't even try. From date field to async/wait to web payments, several HTML5 specifications can't be rolled out easily because of Safari.

I am old enough to remember the last time that happened, IE killed Netscape and left web development in stalemate. Chrome changed that and continues to push it forward till this day. It also gave birth to V8 engine and Node.js. IMO, we owe open web to Google Chrome.

> Are Google products getting worse?

Yes. But _why_ is a better question. I'd attribute it to their killing off their best products [0], but they even slow down the products they have [1].

Also - why would you keep using their products given that it's common knowledge that Google is anti-consumer in practice? The days of "don't be evil" are unfortunately behind us.

[0]: https://gcemetery.co/

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/14/google_android_data_a...

> why would you keep using their products given that it's common knowledge that Google is anti-consumer in practice?

For the same reason I'd keep renting from a landlord who let me rent for free, even if they were anti-tenant.

Correct. Google products used to be free, and noticeably better than the competition. Now they're just free.

What if they had a camera in every room watching you?

What if they were constantly in your living room pushing crazy politics on you?

What if they refused to fix or do maintenance on the property, or they started removing rooms from the house?

What if they went to great pains to prevent you from removing anything you owned from the house?

Free can be surprisingly expensive in the long term.

Lets say they did, I still havent found a better payed alternative.

> why would you keep using their products...

Because the only realistic alternative is iPhones and those come with their own set of issues w/ not allowing sideloading, root, etc.

Yeah, at that point it comes down to "Do you want to own your product? Or would you prefer slightly less anti-consumer practices on some other levels?"

Google Search - I wonder if it's suffering from SEO issues too (i.e., losing the arms race). Often feels like I'm reading through constant content farms.

Yes, I was using Google Translate today and it seems to have been written by a 4 year old. It pops up dialogs over hover based menus so you can't inspect them, slow and clunky. The worst side effect of this is that because their weight, smaller companies that could do a better job don't even bother. Google sucks, if you work there, please try to find employment at a company that isn't evil.

I noticed that copy/paste in Gmail web in Safari just messes up very visibly the text style, including for simple plain text (no style attached!) you just move around.

Had to systematically use Alt-Cmd-Shift-V to workaround it (paste without formatting), as this is the only option around mentioned in forums...

Anyone has the same weird behavior here ?

(Google, please fix it!)

As a completely unrelated sidenote, thank you very much for teaching me that "paste without formatting" shortcut. My time dealing with Atlassian tools will be much more pleasant now.

Anyone else remember when the https://googleblog.blogspot.com was one of the most exciting sites on the web? I used to check it religiously. Haven't looked at it for several years now.

Google search has become terrible. I was doing some biology research and it kept on pushing covid results and news about it.

In other cases it is as if, whenever possible, google will choose an interpretation that best suits some ideological interest rather than the most useful.

I think in general, no, however Search has had a notable decline in quality and the removal of free features from Photos is disappointing.

"Google Search at this point is a joke".. Really? Is there any better alternative?

Just because the other options aren't great doesn't mean Google's search isn't bad.

yes

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