Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Side note - why does it feel like so many of Google's products, and especially their most core offerings are in a state of ongoing decay? Search is getting worse. Maps today is worse than maps 10 years ago. Even their Google home assistants, YouTube, Gmail, and other products just seem to be steadily creeping into more annoyances and less usability.

There was a time I felt that Google's search was head and shoulders above anyone else's and when I reluctantly used DDG I felt I was compromising some aspect of search value for privacy value. But now when I use Google search I'm bombarded with ads, find I can't trust search results, and even copying search links results in a mess of Google redirect.

What is happening to the core Google products or am I a curmudgeon for believing that the Internet was at its most functional and user-friendly best circa 2008?

To be fair, you would not want to be confronted with the reality of these products 10 years ago, there's been a million bug fixes that have been done since then. But I agree on Search, it's almost like they sabotaged it.

The search too. Wikipedia articles and useful covid graphs. Excellent context inference. The assistant is surprisingly powerful when I ask engineering questions (what's the coefficient for this when that).

I would wager a guess that its due to lack of competition. Apple Maps only works on iOS. DDG is great but the search results aren’t. Does YouTube even have a competitor?

I don’t think you’re a curmudgeon at all. Circa 2008, Google was innovating in a lot of different areas that were very valuable to the average user. The ROI on these services has gone way down.

NB: Apple Maps also has a dedicated Mac app.

While that's true, GP's point still stands. You can use G-Maps on all platforms that have a browser, but you can't use A-Maps that way.

And a web API, so you can embed it in your website.

I thing things get bloated and bloated until there’s a rewrite. This is what happened for the facebook app, and google maps is very close to that point. I’ve started using apple maps more and more and I like it. I’m semi joking when I say that I upgraded to the latest iphone just to use gmaps.

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