> Expect bugs but not regression of core product offerings.
Google's web search has gotten worse over the years. Unless of course we want to say that their only truly core product is ads, in which case I'm skeptical but willing to concede that you may be right.
> Google's web search has gotten worse over the years.
People keep pointing that out, but few want to acknowledge that the web has gotten worse over the years.
When was the last time you stumbled onto a web page written by a caring human author to accurately explain some part of the world just because they're into it? Those kinds of pages used to be all over the web. If you did a search for some random topic, you'd find, essentially, a non-commercial fansite for that exact topic.
But these days, much of the web is commercialized, fewer users know how to write HTML, and people who want to share content typically do so behind walled gardens like Facebook.
Blaming Google's web search for getting worse is like blaming your tour guide when you have a shitty hike because the forest burned down.
For me, and I imagine many people in the world, Google Search has gotten more useful in recent years. The information I'm looking for is presented in the first screen, or just a few clicks away.
Finding a particular website about a topic isn't the main use case; it's to find a snippet of information, like who played some character on a TV show or whatever.
Publishers certainly don't like it, but it works well for users.
That's part of it, but these sites are still out there. The SEO game has also just gotten more aggressive, and they now have to compete with quora pages you can't actually read once you click on them and blogspam
Android is basically the best example of Google's perpetual beta problem. They're constantly adding features and then silently dropping them a few years later because they were forgotten about and no one wanted to maintain them.
They constantly deprecate apps and replace them with worse ones, they redesign the notification shade every other update, they'll say they're committing to tablets every few years but apps having tablet-optimized modes lasts until the app is redesigned in a couple years and they stopped caring about tablets by that point.
Google treats its users like beta testers, but instead of getting paid you pay them with your data and/or money. I went through the wringer enough times that I finally bought an iPhone and have no desire to go back. Was I shocked that last time I turned on my Pixel 3 and updated it, the notification shade, messaging app, Play Store, settings app, and nearly everything else was completely redesigned? No, not at all.
