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I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered.

Google's recent UI changes are about branding, not UX.

I agree with your points. I categorize them under growing pains. Good UX is not easy - especially when you have such a large number of users and products.

If you look into the reasoning for many of the cluttered items, you will see things like "doing X would make it more readable/useful/etc for the general population".

Perhaps I am just an optimist. My fingers are crossed.

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