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Comment by hsuresh | Hacker News Reader

Bit off topic. But i seriously don't understand the negative sentiment anything related to Google of late. It used to be Facebook a while back, and it seems to be Google's turn right now. There must be some sort of group behaviour explanation to this.

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They killed my fantastic google reader experience, and forced the "social" aspect of it into G+. This might seem shallow on my side, but I am still livid about this. They completely ruined the reader experience for me. They tried to mesh too much social into one product. Too many generalities, not enough specialization. Even with their "circles". Now I don't even use reader, when it used to be my crack fix.

Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.

Also, I had a perfectly one off custom color scheme in gmail, and I couldn't transfer it over to the new style. now I'm just bickering. I'm really only legitimately pissed about reader.....

I hate that link between G+ and gchat, also.

> Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.

While it's semi-annoying that people in your G+ circles get added to gchat by default, you can easily disable this. https://plus.google.com -> click the arrow by your name in contact list -> privacy settings -> change to "custom" and disable any/all circles you don't want on your gchat list.

Thanks. I've been muckin around the settings in gmail a little, and was able to fix it a bit, but this seems a much more complete solution.

Also worth noting for anyone who is annoyed by the fact that these contacts are automagically added to your android phonebook(For instance Angry Birds apparently warrant a place in my phonebook?)

I found a nice setting in Android which only shows contacts with phone numbers. Invaluable. Otherwise I love Google contacts for syncing etc.

In a few words, they are not thinking as much as before as to what Their core clients want. I.e. better search, among other things.

Shoving Google+ in everyone's mouth was not a smart move. Not everyone likes social media, and sharing stuff. Google used to serve the people who were primarily interested in "reading" the web, not necessarily participating into its content.

And the fact that Larry Page considers the move as "successful" and obviously does not acknowledge that they have any kind of issue is concerning. They are NOT listening to feedback. Just like they forced on everyone that horrible gmail redesign. Where was the feedback taken in account?

Just one thing I wanted to add. The "old" Google was all about solving problems. Searching on the net was difficult. They made it easy and relatively accurate. Creating documents online was a pain, they made Google Docs. Email clients were troublesome and did not have advanced features. They made Gmail. It was not easy to link addresses to real-life locations. They made Google Maps. Google Code made it easy to find out code extracts. Arguably, not all of their products solved problems, but many did.

Google Plus - does not solve any problem I had with their services. Actually made things worse as I do not want to share data among all those services, I like to keep apples and bananas in separate places.

Google Chrome - it's always good to have competition, but honestly, it does not bring much more than Firefox. It's not solving much of an issue here. What's with all the TV ads for a mere browser?

Google Play - I don't know what they are trying to solve here. Again, nothing wrong with adding more competitors on that field, but that's not really new-to-the-world problem solving solution. It's just more of the same stuff. It's plain boring.

This being said, the Google Cars project is very much true to the original spirit of the company. So, it's not all bad. But overall, there's a lot more crap being produced.

It could be a lot of people just think they are moving in the wrong direction, or perhaps no direction at all, in the last year. In my case the Google services I use are Docs, which has seen almost no improvement in ages, GMail which in my opinion took a step backwards, and Android which has only improved because I spent a few hours loading an ICS ROM onto my unsupported phone. They're not giving me much to be positive about right now. I'm not interested in Google+ and the more it's been shoved in my face the less interested I get.

> There must be some sort of group behaviour explanation to this.

Inasmuch as Google acts and observers all sharing the same planet react, sure.

Let's run down the list!

- Perceived decline in search quality. They've remedied this to a decent extent, but when your SERPs are full of spammy, scrape-y dogshit for the better part of 18 months, that's going to ding your brand a bit.

- Shoe-horning Google+ into SERPs. Clutters a UI that was once sacred, often with content of lesser value than crawlable content from other platforms.

- Sharing user information across Google products that users considered to be separate. Complicated. Good for Google – helps their business. Not unreasonable for users to be suspicious.

- For special bonus points: Every time Schmidt's mouth has opened for the last three years, the creepiest shit pours out.

Google's willingness – delight? – to be misunderstood for long periods of time is laudable, but costly in terms of potentially irreplaceable goodwill.

> Perceived decline in search quality.

Perceived? Result #2 in my industry features a site with 10 inbound links, while result #3 has #13. I can't start to imagine how much black SEO those companies are engaged in, but that is generally indicative of first-page results, which feature none of the paid and free services people actually use.

Maybe search is a "hard problem", but the reason Google gets crap over its quality freefall is that the company has the aggregate anonymized data to tell webmasters how long visitors stay on their sites keyword-by-keyword. And yet the company refuses to use this data to prune the garbage from its results, and instead seems focused on mining individual search data to compete with Facebook.

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