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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712
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.
People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
