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.
> 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.
I feel that people are so weirdly negative about Google's products. I have some concerns about Google but I need to admit their products are good. I think a lot of people on here don't like them as a business and it clouds their views of the products.
> Gmail
Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.
> Android
Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...
> Chrome
I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.
Email providers is about who you trust to have access to your correspondence, and in terms of a company, access to customer information and any sensitive information related to operations, staff and so on. Worst provider is the one you don't trust.
I totally get that there are reasons to use proton mail and I even use it. But I was purely talking about product here. I think some people allow their feelings about data privacy and business practices to cloud their judgement about product.
I think you misunderstand me there. When it comes to email (and postal service), trust is the product.
It is a bit like comparing a bank, a stock option broker, and a gambling site, and discussing which provide a better product to hold your money. It make no sense comparing them unless we view them as providing the same service.
> 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.
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.
"If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior."
Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.