Competition always is. I think there was a real fear that their core product was going to be replaced. They're already cannibalizing it internally so it was THE wake up call.

Just not search. The search product has pretty much become useless over the past 3 years and the AI answers often will get just to the level of 5 years ago. This creates a sense that that things are better - but really it’s just become impossible to get reliable information from an avenue that used to work very well.

I don’t think this is intentional, but I think they stopped fighting SEO entirely to focus on AI. Recipes are the best example - completely gutted and almost all receive sites (therefore the entire search page) run by the same company. I didn’t realize how utterly consolidated huge portions of information on the internet was until every recipe site about 3 months ago simultaneously implemented the same anti-Adblock.

Next they compete on ads...

I do miss Google+. For my brain / use case, it was by far the best social network out there, and the Circle friends and interest management system is still unparalleled :)

Google+ was fun. Failed in the market though.

Apple made a social network called Ping. Disaster. MobileMe was silly.

Microsoft made Zune and the Kin 1 and Kin 2 devices and Windows phone and all sorts of other disasters.

These things happen.