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There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are sim

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.

danielheath 1y ago
Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list. Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back. The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago
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lolc 1y ago
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty. As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great. Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.
- standyro 1y ago
  The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
  - kergonath 1y ago
    The most infuriating is that Google Maps used to be much better. But yeah, it’s crap.
BeetleB 1y ago
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems: - There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need. - When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results. 99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues. Thank God for Kagi. > gmail Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail? > maps I'll grant you this one. > android It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware. > chrome The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior. Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.
- Krssst 1y ago
  > It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware. Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
  - windexh8er 1y ago
    It's also amazing how awesome Android can be. When you compare GrapheneOS / CalyxOS you go from a slow, bloated phone that lasts maybe a day - to a phone you have complete control of that is performant and lasts days on a charge. The contrast is stark and most people have no clue those options exist.
jasonfarnon 1y ago
Products like engine, gmail, maps, and youtube were game-changers when first released. But that was a long time ago and right now plenty of competitors would step in and do a decent copycat job.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working. People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
windexh8er 1y ago
> But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased. Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.
- mortos 1y ago
  DDG is definitely not better IME, and also relies heavily on Bing. I still use it as my default, it's good enough, but I mostly default to it to avoid the Google captcha hell. Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712
  - yegg 1y ago
    Thank you for providing an example we can look into. If you have other thoughts, please also feel free to share them with me, and I'll take them back to the team. My email is in my profile if that method is preferred. Despite what some people think, we do a lot of the search results ourselves and we're constantly working to improve our search experience. We post quarterly updates to https://duckduckgo.com/updates https://duckduckgo.com/updates
    - mortos 1y ago
      I appreciate you having an open ear and reaching out. As I said, it's hard to drum up examples but I do throw in the !g bang a fair bit. With the privacy requirements maybe you can't, but it could be interesting to see if you can find searches where people try a couple times then throw in the !g to try and find examples. I can't be the only one with this workflow. I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab". As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.
mzmzmzm 1y ago
When is the last time any of these things have improved? Gmail and Maps are excellent but static. Is it inconceivable that competitors could match that level of service if they didn't have to compete on unfair terms, where Google's monopoly on data (I have to list my restaurant on Maps because it's dominant and I want to be found, thus Maps is more complete, etc) always gives them a comfortable edge?

danielheath 1y ago

Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list. Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back. The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.

inquirerGeneral 1y ago
[dead]

lolc 1y ago

> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty. As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great. Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.

standyro 1y ago
The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
- kergonath 1y ago
  The most infuriating is that Google Maps used to be much better. But yeah, it’s crap.

BeetleB 1y ago

> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems: - There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need. - When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results. 99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues. Thank God for Kagi. > gmail Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail? > maps I'll grant you this one. > android It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware. > chrome The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior. Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.

Krssst 1y ago
> It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware. Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
- windexh8er 1y ago
  It's also amazing how awesome Android can be. When you compare GrapheneOS / CalyxOS you go from a slow, bloated phone that lasts maybe a day - to a phone you have complete control of that is performant and lasts days on a charge. The contrast is stark and most people have no clue those options exist.

jasonfarnon 1y ago

Products like engine, gmail, maps, and youtube were game-changers when first released. But that was a long time ago and right now plenty of competitors would step in and do a decent copycat job.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working. People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.

windexh8er 1y ago

> But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased. Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.

mortos 1y ago
DDG is definitely not better IME, and also relies heavily on Bing. I still use it as my default, it's good enough, but I mostly default to it to avoid the Google captcha hell. Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712
- yegg 1y ago
  Thank you for providing an example we can look into. If you have other thoughts, please also feel free to share them with me, and I'll take them back to the team. My email is in my profile if that method is preferred. Despite what some people think, we do a lot of the search results ourselves and we're constantly working to improve our search experience. We post quarterly updates to https://duckduckgo.com/updates https://duckduckgo.com/updates
  - mortos 1y ago
    I appreciate you having an open ear and reaching out. As I said, it's hard to drum up examples but I do throw in the !g bang a fair bit. With the privacy requirements maybe you can't, but it could be interesting to see if you can find searches where people try a couple times then throw in the !g to try and find examples. I can't be the only one with this workflow. I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab". As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.

mzmzmzm 1y ago

When is the last time any of these things have improved? Gmail and Maps are excellent but static. Is it inconceivable that competitors could match that level of service if they didn't have to compete on unfair terms, where Google's monopoly on data (I have to list my restaurant on Maps because it's dominant and I want to be found, thus Maps is more complete, etc) always gives them a comfortable edge?