On the other hand, I don’t personally want autosuggest, analytics, G+ integration, live updates, an apps tray, or any of the rest.

For me, Google’s homepage circa 2005 was just as useful as the current one (or more useful even, since their results weren’t as crapped up by SEO spam sites, and the search syntax itself was more power-user friendly and predictable).

I used to occasionally click google ads, but they’ve gotten so obnoxious that I just zap the domain in /etc/hosts. I used to exclusively use google search, but it’s gotten slow and annoying enough that I now mostly use duckduckgo instead.

Clearly that’s not the main part of their user base, but spending a decade chasing money at the expense of user experience isn’t all upside, even for Google.