It may be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when every web-based product google made seemed like amazing, fluid pixie-dust magic compared to the competition.

Things I can remember being absolutely revolutionary when new:

- Gmail

- Google maps

- Google docs

At the time, this quality and sophistication of engineering was simply unheard of for web-based products.

Now they’re all slow, laggy, terrible resource hogs with ugly, non-intuitive UI on top. Worse in almost every way.

They’ve clearly lost their edge.

I'd say they were originally with google.com. It had much better UX than other search engines at the time. Which were typically cluttered with news, weather, horoscopes and lots of other non-search related stuff. Google's version being focused purely on search was very refreshing and a lot nicer to use.

Would also echo the other replies re: gmail.

OG gmail '04 https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0401gmail-launches/