What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that.
Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt
Reddit is chipping away the Q&A search, but time will tell if it has a similar downfall to quora/yahoo-answers.
I’ve seen TikTok lead in educational search, cooking, gardening etc. TikTok could potentially overtake YouTube all together over next 5-10years.
Google maps isn’t as far ahead as it once was. Apple caught up.
Then you got Microsoft whos teams and office suite whicj caught up and surpassed google’s office products (for what enterprise buyers care on)
Leaving what. GCP as their only disruptive marketshare product area? And GCP while high margin isn’t nearly as high margin as their ads businesses. For GCP to be profitable they need to severely cut wages for cost center roles. A PgM in GCP shouldn’t be making 300k when AWS and Azure spend just 200k on the same role.
Finally you’ve got the money pit of waymo, X, and the bets. All of them have neither a real path to profitability nor compelling return on investment.
Id say the investors are right. Google is the new IBM, return profits to shareholders so they can invest them in more fruitful endeavors.
The past couple of years Google maps has gotten more glitchy, given worse directions, and most recently started showing extreme lag. Maps in CarPlay started falling behind real-time. First by a few seconds, then by minutes. Wasn’t sure if it was the car head unit, phone, reception or what.
Out of desperation I tried Apple Maps. Not only did it work flawlessly, but its driving prompts are greatly superior to Google maps.
I could go on about YouTube having broken bulk-publishing of videos (this for my son’s football and basketball games chopped up into indivuap videos).
It’s all horrible now.
Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.
Apple Maps will get better at reviews as more people switch over.
And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.
So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..
Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo.
It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for.
Then, about four or five months ago, something happened to Duck, and it's gotten significantly worse. Short lists of results. More results that are off-topic than on. In the last couple of weeks, for me it's as bad as Google was before.
I'll stick with Duck because it's not trying to harvest every morsel of my life to make a quick buck. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed a very quick and very significant change in quality with their DuckDuckGo results?
Anecdotally it seems they do more fuzzy match and adhere less to exact matches even when keywords or phrases are quoted.
It's been frustrating to see specificity of results decline.
I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot.
It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.
You literally can't go to page 2 anymore
It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see.
Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.
I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.
I think it’s a little tricky separating the two since Google has so much influence over the web. A lot of the parts of the web which have gotten worse were due to decisions they made to do things like cut ad revenue for normal organic content, declining to punish or even rewarding blackhat SEO, pushing AMP, shuttering Reader, etc. That sold a lot of ads at the time and people said it was needed to counter Facebook but it’s left them more vulnerable now.
The only score that matters is the one in real life, in the game you choose to play. If it gets harder, you need to get better.