Google is data driven and AB tests the hell out of their features, so I would assume these changes make them money somehow. Your personal preferences or anyone else's is merely a very small data point in their design process.
The presumption that someone in theory has access to lots of information and therefore is making the best or even good decisions on some dimensions by virtue of the their access to data is poorly considered. It is entirely possible to be smart and possessed of good data and still use it poorly. People are flawed so companies made of of people are also flawed.
Google image search is a poor product not worth using compared to bing.
My feeling about its utility isn't a scientific statement its purely anecdotal but at least it represents a singular actual and honest viewpoint.
You are free if you liked to express the alternative perspective that the changes are for the better for users or for google and this would be an equally honest anecdote even if we disagree.
The only intellectually dishonest viewpoint is to assert without detail or analysis that its good along some dimension because it is AB tested.
Google image search is mediocre for the following reasons
- They removed the button to actually go TO the image in response to a lawsuit with Getty on the theory that somehow making people go through an extra step would stop people from using their built in browser tools to download images.
- When you go to the page where the image is supposed to be you may actually find yourself on a page only vaguely related to the exact image. Maybe it WAS found on the front page of some infinite scroll through crap but the desired image is nowhere to be found when you click through and get whatever new crap replaced it on the front page.
- Alternatively you get served a smaller sized version of the image.
- Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later.
- Google image search seems to deliver subjectively worse image search results. I realize this is hard to quantify.
- On the broader google search issues you actually need an extension to be able to right click on a link and copy the url to share it because otherwise you get something like this
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test
It's pretty amazing to break sharing a damn link. The addon to fix this requires worrisome permissions to the data for google.com
Also the search "this is a test" without adblock doesn't show any of the textual results on the entire screen on a 24" 1080p monitor. Screen 1 and 2 are a video, exhortations to buy the song, people also search for videos and finally some actual results on screen 3.
Google is basically 90s Lycos with lots of extra money and reach. Everything google does other than ads and chrome ranges from acceptable to just canceled. They do lots of things OK but nothing excellent.
And reverse image search still doesn't work unless you spoof your user agent as mobile Chrome.
The problem with that is if they introduce a bug that requires you to refresh the page more often. All they'd see is an up-tick in "engagement" and keep the change with the bug. I think it happened to me with Facebook page notifications and not being able to clear them properly, at least on Firefox...
This makes me wonder if there is some structure similar to a corporation which would maximise something besides profit, without either being out-competed by a corporation or turning into one.
A private company, however structured, can define out-competing however its owners want to so long as it can pay its bills and employees.