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> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry. > Thanks to those early investment

> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry. > Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. Does he really believe this? Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse, or the product being unceremoniously dumped after a year. Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see. Their office suite is pretty impressive, but again I can't trust that it (or my files) will be there when I need them.

clint 4y ago
I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to share your fears.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good company. I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3) unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an account.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Even on HN, you’re in the minority. If you took HN as a representative sample, you’d think Linux was the #1 OS by a long shot even though it’s a rounding error for personal usage. There’s a big old bubble here.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the world is Android. If you squint, you can call that Linux.
- nomel 4y ago
  At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare: "how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work" bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+pressure+sensor+work https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press... google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors+work https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors... I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.
  - brazzledazzle 4y ago
    The results are slightly different but where they overlap the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's it?
    - nomel 4y ago
      For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations. But, even without images, the "explore further" recommendations are fantastic, with direct links to research papers. Google seems to not recommend research papers (zero on my results).
  - uvesten 4y ago
    Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone, google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to answer the question, maybe… Bing, otoh, has an explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as the first thing on the page. I guess I’ll try switching default search engine now. (For me, google results have definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_ for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads and unrelated results.)
- wishfish 4y ago
  At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.
RationPhantoms 4y ago
Well Search is definitely better for Google's Shareholders. They've always made a killing but must be making substantially more with how degraded the product has felt recently.
0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
> I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse This is my big one as well. As Google refuses to segregate accounts, nebulously AI defined “bad” behavior on YouTube or GCP could lock me out of my digital life.
- college_physics 4y ago
  Its terrifying for anybody ecking an existence in tech (without deep pockets). Those who built businesses around facebook and now twitter know all too well the risks of being a digital serf. But you argue it was their choice. You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on google. This is not how things should bem
hourago 4y ago
> Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. Google product is not the search, but the advertisements. I can believe that Google has gotten better at showing more ads to more people. The services like mail or search are just a way to get people to see that ads.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Sure, but as search circles the drain, they will lose eyeballs.
thanhhaimai 4y ago
> but search seems worse every day. Search is a reflection of the internet. The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Huh?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      The biggest signal in Google's site ranking must be user clicks without returns (IE, user found something they wanted, clicked on it, and didn't come back to Google to search more). That would be good at filtering spammy pages, and shows things that are already known to be popular at the top. Rather than using link structure, use user clicks.
      - mike_d 4y ago
        That is not the metric used to determine result quality. But if it were, you'd be correct.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  What you and other's replying here are suggesting then is a downward spiral for Google's search. Either Google needs to significantly shift gears or all of us need to look toward the next search paradigm that is not blighted by AI SEO crap.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  It's happening more and more often that the first result doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short queries. I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I don't waste my time. They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example, yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The first result has bolded "general linear transformation model." I can't even tell what "general" and "transformational" are mapping to in my query.
brightball 4y ago
> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see. I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time. I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.
- bosch_mind 4y ago
  Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used
  - brightball 4y ago
    When did you use it last?
    - bosch_mind 4y ago
      Every day
    - nomel 4y ago
      Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but problems within the last few months of use include: * long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes later. everything else works. * often shows week old conversations when I open it fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it * sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to manually scroll, even after page reload * absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab, seriously wtf) * "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached window. I'm patiently waiting for beeper.
      - 4y ago
azinman2 4y ago
In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.
sangnoir 4y ago
> Does he really believe this? I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam. What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less adversarial times.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that, while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds like it was written by a high school student trying to pad the word count for a few pages.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing.
  - htag 4y ago
    Yes, Google search results are worse than they were in it's height. Google front page is a whale of a target. At no point has there been more sophisticated attacks for people trying to hit front page with low-quality content. The position you parent comment took is that Google of today is better at resisting those attacks, and no one version of Google would provide as good results on today's internet. I believe Google is fundamentally failing at it's mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". That's not to say that Google Search isn't better at searching today's internet than any other iteration of Google Search would have been.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      >and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". What do you mean? It's still part of their current values. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
_ea1k 4y ago
Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at the top. Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next. Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web properties are maybe about the same, at best. And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.
deadmutex 4y ago
> Does he really believe this? Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor. No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Same as with ads: There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free ... not a single remotely useful ad. I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.
- amf12 4y ago
  Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO spam. When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product bad per se.
michaelgrosner2 4y ago
I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in. OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.
- westernpopular 4y ago
  Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.
    - eitland 4y ago
      Many continued to use Altavista or something until a friendly sysadmin or another early user showed them Google. Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.
- unsui 4y ago
  > Next to no one uses Android, etc. Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-economic factors that determine who you surround yourself with. In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone, everyone else uses android.
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense. > Next to no one uses Android, etc. That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
numbsafari 4y ago
> Does he really believe this? Does S.U.N.D.A.R. really believe anything? Do advanced holographic CEO chat bots dream of electric employees?
dcist 4y ago
After the way Google treated Stadia, I can't trust any Google product enough to fully rely on it.
- amf12 4y ago
  I think Stadia is something they handled well. Refunds to people. There are worse deprecation examples you can find.
suzzer99 4y ago
I'll believe it when Google Maps stops asking me if I want to get off the highway, drive around in a big square, then get back on at the same exit going the same way. No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not tempted.
- jimbobimbo 4y ago
  Many such cases. Every major company (FAANGM) talks big about being all-in on AI, but when you use their products in your daily life, stupid stuff like parent's map example is glaring.
kmarc 4y ago
That announcement was meant to be mostly for the shareholders when MS's ChatGPT and copilot is the next big thing which is actually usable IRL. This is a site for techies, so you and I search for IRL techs from Google that are products of the mentioned AI-first years We (he and you+me) have different understanding of stuff, and probably Different friend circles and audience. And that is fine. Hope the good ones out of the 12k find a good job afterwards where their work result in actual real life products.
vishnugupta 4y ago
> Does he really believe this? This is also a signal to the stock markets that Google is getting onto the AI bandwagon, to milk the current hype around AI.
hintymad 4y ago
> Their office suite is pretty impressive Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience. Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had since years ago: - A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create a bookmark first. - Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell? - Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit. - Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly and crippled. - Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the link back to my doc? Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?
cbeach 4y ago
Yes, I remember being permanently blocked from using Adsense without warning or explanation. As far as I know, I’d done nothing wrong. Nothing even remotely dodgy. Reading your comment reminds me that I should be careful not to rely too heavily on Google Docs and Workspace. Google is too big to offer the personal touch. They’re a very cold and uncompromising company.

clint 4y ago

I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to share your fears.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
justin_oaks 4y ago
While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good company. I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3) unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an account.
- pb7 4y ago
  Even on HN, you’re in the minority. If you took HN as a representative sample, you’d think Linux was the #1 OS by a long shot even though it’s a rounding error for personal usage. There’s a big old bubble here.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the world is Android. If you squint, you can call that Linux.
nomel 4y ago
At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare: "how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work" bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+pressure+sensor+work https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press... google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors+work https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors... I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.
- brazzledazzle 4y ago
  The results are slightly different but where they overlap the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's it?
  - nomel 4y ago
    For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations. But, even without images, the "explore further" recommendations are fantastic, with direct links to research papers. Google seems to not recommend research papers (zero on my results).
- uvesten 4y ago
  Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone, google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to answer the question, maybe… Bing, otoh, has an explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as the first thing on the page. I guess I’ll try switching default search engine now. (For me, google results have definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_ for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads and unrelated results.)
wishfish 4y ago
At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.

RationPhantoms 4y ago

Well Search is definitely better for Google's Shareholders. They've always made a killing but must be making substantially more with how degraded the product has felt recently.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago

> I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse This is my big one as well. As Google refuses to segregate accounts, nebulously AI defined “bad” behavior on YouTube or GCP could lock me out of my digital life.

college_physics 4y ago
Its terrifying for anybody ecking an existence in tech (without deep pockets). Those who built businesses around facebook and now twitter know all too well the risks of being a digital serf. But you argue it was their choice. You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on google. This is not how things should bem

hourago 4y ago

> Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. Google product is not the search, but the advertisements. I can believe that Google has gotten better at showing more ads to more people. The services like mail or search are just a way to get people to see that ads.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Sure, but as search circles the drain, they will lose eyeballs.

thanhhaimai 4y ago

> but search seems worse every day. Search is a reflection of the internet. The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.

ipaddr 4y ago
It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.
- lazide 4y ago
  Huh?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    The biggest signal in Google's site ranking must be user clicks without returns (IE, user found something they wanted, clicked on it, and didn't come back to Google to search more). That would be good at filtering spammy pages, and shows things that are already known to be popular at the top. Rather than using link structure, use user clicks.
    - mike_d 4y ago
      That is not the metric used to determine result quality. But if it were, you'd be correct.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
What you and other's replying here are suggesting then is a downward spiral for Google's search. Either Google needs to significantly shift gears or all of us need to look toward the next search paradigm that is not blighted by AI SEO crap.
adamsb6 4y ago
It's happening more and more often that the first result doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short queries. I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I don't waste my time. They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example, yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The first result has bolded "general linear transformation model." I can't even tell what "general" and "transformational" are mapping to in my query.

brightball 4y ago

> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see. I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time. I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.

bosch_mind 4y ago
Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used
- brightball 4y ago
  When did you use it last?
  - bosch_mind 4y ago
    Every day
  - nomel 4y ago
    Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but problems within the last few months of use include: * long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes later. everything else works. * often shows week old conversations when I open it fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it * sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to manually scroll, even after page reload * absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab, seriously wtf) * "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached window. I'm patiently waiting for beeper.
    - 4y ago

azinman2 4y ago

In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.

sangnoir 4y ago

> Does he really believe this? I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam. What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less adversarial times.

ok123456 4y ago
Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that, while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds like it was written by a high school student trying to pad the word count for a few pages.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing.
- htag 4y ago
  Yes, Google search results are worse than they were in it's height. Google front page is a whale of a target. At no point has there been more sophisticated attacks for people trying to hit front page with low-quality content. The position you parent comment took is that Google of today is better at resisting those attacks, and no one version of Google would provide as good results on today's internet. I believe Google is fundamentally failing at it's mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". That's not to say that Google Search isn't better at searching today's internet than any other iteration of Google Search would have been.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". What do you mean? It's still part of their current values. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
- red-iron-pine 4y ago

_ea1k 4y ago

Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at the top. Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next. Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web properties are maybe about the same, at best. And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.

deadmutex 4y ago

> Does he really believe this? Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.

nvrspyx 4y ago
Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor. No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.
- eitland 4y ago
  Same as with ads: There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free ... not a single remotely useful ad. I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.
amf12 4y ago
Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO spam. When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product bad per se.

michaelgrosner2 4y ago

I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in. OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.

westernpopular 4y ago
Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Many continued to use Altavista or something until a friendly sysadmin or another early user showed them Google. Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.
unsui 4y ago
> Next to no one uses Android, etc. Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-economic factors that determine who you surround yourself with. In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone, everyone else uses android.
ifyoubuildit 4y ago
In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense. > Next to no one uses Android, etc. That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

numbsafari 4y ago

> Does he really believe this? Does S.U.N.D.A.R. really believe anything? Do advanced holographic CEO chat bots dream of electric employees?

dcist 4y ago

After the way Google treated Stadia, I can't trust any Google product enough to fully rely on it.

amf12 4y ago
I think Stadia is something they handled well. Refunds to people. There are worse deprecation examples you can find.

suzzer99 4y ago

I'll believe it when Google Maps stops asking me if I want to get off the highway, drive around in a big square, then get back on at the same exit going the same way. No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not tempted.

jimbobimbo 4y ago
Many such cases. Every major company (FAANGM) talks big about being all-in on AI, but when you use their products in your daily life, stupid stuff like parent's map example is glaring.

kmarc 4y ago

That announcement was meant to be mostly for the shareholders when MS's ChatGPT and copilot is the next big thing which is actually usable IRL. This is a site for techies, so you and I search for IRL techs from Google that are products of the mentioned AI-first years We (he and you+me) have different understanding of stuff, and probably Different friend circles and audience. And that is fine. Hope the good ones out of the 12k find a good job afterwards where their work result in actual real life products.

vishnugupta 4y ago

> Does he really believe this? This is also a signal to the stock markets that Google is getting onto the AI bandwagon, to milk the current hype around AI.

hintymad 4y ago

> Their office suite is pretty impressive Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience. Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had since years ago: - A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create a bookmark first. - Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell? - Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit. - Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly and crippled. - Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the link back to my doc? Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?

cbeach 4y ago

Yes, I remember being permanently blocked from using Adsense without warning or explanation. As far as I know, I’d done nothing wrong. Nothing even remotely dodgy. Reading your comment reminds me that I should be careful not to rely too heavily on Google Docs and Workspace. Google is too big to offer the personal touch. They’re a very cold and uncompromising company.