The Mediocrity of Modern Google
om.co"The company remains trapped in its “10 blue links” jail, even as the world moves toward direct, conversational AI interfaces."
I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search.
If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend.
They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for me lately" just a little weird. They have done zillions of crappy things and a dozen earth shaking ones. If the next earth shaking one comes from someone else I don't see any point in waggling my finger at Google over it.
I think much of what Google was used for by many including probably yourself we called search, but it was really asking for answers.
Link are good for search. Where wherever algo leads you to data that may have information you are looking for.
On the other hand, if I just want the answer to a specific question, then links, that we tolerated for so long are bad. They are bad because once presented I now I have to dig and sort through the data to find the answer. It will nearly always be in a different format than the last and take away mental stamina that could be applied to the actual task I am trying to accomplish.
Google, if they stick to links, will continue to be a good search company. The problem is people don’t and did not actually want to search, they simply wanted answers. And thus this is why the entire industry of search will probably go away.
Google is going to have to make a decision. Continue to be search, a product in which demand is dwindling, or be in the business is providing answers.
The problem is when you say 'answers' what is provided are 'curated answers' which is what google has been doing which explains the terrible spam links. SEO is a way to provide an answer but usually not the one you want.
Curated answers are not the same sort of answer I am talking about. In no way are answers generated by openAI really curated ( barring some political drama ).
Google understands that people want answers, and thus why they implemented answers.
A big problem for Google is I don’t think their revenue model works well with actual answers. Nobody cares about going to the site any more. In fact I am sure there were many talks internally at Google limiting what sort of answers they do provide that would result in less clicks on links.
Ad driven search as we know it is dead. For pay chat bots have a good chance of replacing ad driven speech.
SEO is effectively dead with AI chat system, thus again putting googles future in jeopardy.
Googles executives need to decide if they are going to be blockbuster, Redbox or Netflix, time is running out.
To be fair, beside technical documents, most of the link from Google are not worth reading.
It is mostly SEO spam, written by LLMs anyway. At that point I prefer the summary from Google.
I am not defending the model, but it is just the reality right now.
A couple of things have struck me about Google as an outsider:
- Learning that they had 100K+ employees
- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank
- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]
- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills
- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)
In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.
Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.
(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)
All large and successful companies head in this direction. You get a few killer products, the stakes become really high, and now you spend more time making sure the cash keeps flowing instead of trying to do something radically new. People talk about startup mentality within a company, but I think that's nearly impossible since you need leadership's attention to get things moving, but there's only so much attention the CEO of a large company can give, and only so much they're willing to delegate. I bet Google spends more time worrying about how to avoid antitrust and complying with regulation than trying to build something radically different. The one exception is AI, but ultimately that's because it threatens their cash cow.
If you have more than 10k employees and still keep the "spark" then you solved almost of all the modern days corporate problems. This is why big corps typically choose to spin off their innovative but not-yet-profitable business. Those C-level people are not stupid; they simply understand that those innovation cannot survive in the entrenched legacies.
What is this dumb article? Gemini pro 2.5 is getting talked a lot about in AI circles. AI Studio team is cracked and has been able to avoid the committee virus. Google has problems but this piece is written by someone who is not knowledgeable about this company and the space at all.
Agree, they write it off as:
> Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation.
But my sense (vibes from using it) is it's the very best model right now (though I have not tried the $200 a month exclusive openai offerings)
One of the worst thing about ChatGPT / Claude is that if you're chatting for too long, they suddenly forget everything due to the limited context length.
Google seems to have understood how important a long context length is and what I absolutely love about AI Studio is that it shows how many tokens you've consumed, so that you know that you should start wrapping it up and move to a new chat.
I also haven't used the $200 exclusive model. But I think Gemini 2.5 is by far and away the best LLM I have used.
I still use Claude for code but for any general reasoning questions, or even just for Socratic dialogue purposes, Gemini has really blown me away.
It is hard to imagine any LLM being so much better that it is worth going from $0 to $200.
I love AI Studio. It's free to use and you can switch between models. Gemini 2.5 Pro's reasoning can be a little slow so if you don't need it you can switch to Gemini 2.0 Flash (which is capable of 100-200 tokens per second). You can even switch between models later. The only downside of using it over the user-facing Gemini web app is that you need to save your chats.
I wish I had a company as mediocre.
(I'm not saying I don't agree with the complaints.)
Google Maps is just a live traffic data set now. I use it during my commute, and its ability to tell me the speed limit of a road segment is deteriorating over time. Google doesn't need any fancy machine learning algorithms to work out what the speed limit of a road is; they just need to work with local governments to get their databases of speed limits. The whole product increasingly reeks of issues that couldn't be replicated in an open-plan office in Mountain View, so probably aren't real.
"Google Maps is not up-to-date enough on the speed limits along the route I drive 10 times per week" is among the dumber complaints I've read. Google of course does what they can to update speed limits. Coverage varies[1]. Some content on Google Maps is provided by government content partners[2].
1: https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage#countryregion-co...
2: https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/144284#...
Does anyone use Google for search any more? My browser default for five years has been duckduckgo. More recently, for any factual question (as opposed to just finding some organization's website given its name, which DDG does fine) I use perplexity. Or on my phone, Claude.
If Google would have been broken up because of anti-trust regulations all of the individual parts would be hyper-focused. And wouldn't shutter from one day to another.
Is this blowhard seriously going by just "Om" now? Pretentious level 9000.
> "I was an early Webpass customer. Back then, before Google acquired it"
The monopolization by modern Google is more like it. They're not competitive because they don't have to be.
The other question is if Webpass was a viable business before Google acquired it. It's common for startups to be acquired when they lack a clear path to profitability - a large company has the resources and clout to turn a borderline business into a good one, even if it's a large company as sclerotic as Google.
> It's common for startups to be acquired when they lack a clear path to profitability
I just can't work out the economic logic of that. It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. I'm not sure how this argues against my point.
> a large company has the resources and clout to turn a borderline business into a good one
I can't determine why a search and advertising company thought it had the requisite skills to run an ISP or to make it a competitive and profitable business.
> even if it's a large company as sclerotic as Google.
The evidence here is that they failed anyways.
> I just can't work out the economic logic of that.
Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product. Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch.
> It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions.
Undoubtedly! But a profitable startup that is dominating a market would not be acquired for a small amount of money (or at all).
> I can't determine why a search and advertising company thought it had the requisite skills to run an ISP or to make it a competitive and profitable business.
Google makes the majority of its money on ads. That being said, it's absolutely brainless to ignore YouTube, Waymo, Pixel, Cloud, etc., etc. when talking about Google's business. All of these would be unicorns if they were independent companies.
> Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product.
There are lots of reasons a company can be unprofitable. Just having a "good product" does not mean there is a "market demand" for the product.
> Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch.
You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be the case? What natural economic factors lead to this outcome?
> that is dominating a market would not be acquired for a small amount of money
You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.
> Google makes the majority of its money on ads.
So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.
> brainless to ignore YouTube, Waymo, Pixel, Cloud,
All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?
> All of these would be unicorns if they were independent companies.
With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.
That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.
> You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be the case? What natural economic factors lead to this outcome?
Economies of scale. That's it. The overhead per employee is much, much smaller in a big company, it's much easier to acquire more labor/investment, and there's much more stability for planning.
This is a GOOD THING. This is how we enjoy cheap goods and services. It's all well and good to crow about small business, but actually dealing with small businesses frankly sucks as a consumer.
> You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.
Google Search dominates the market mostly because it's better than all the other competitors. iPhones dominate the market (at least in the US) because people prefer them. Not all monopolies are the result of illegal behavior, and not all monopolies are equal.
Market dominance is necessary but not sufficient to call a monopoly illegal.
> So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.
If you criteria is "all platforms which could deliver ads" then Google not only doesn't have the market locked up, they're incredibly far from it.
> All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?
I don't know about you, but I find that I go to YouTube to watch videos, call Waymo to physically go from point A to point B, use my phone to make calls and browse, and use Cloud for my compute needs.
Just because a product COULD be used to deliver ads does not mean that's what it's for. It's nuts to try and see the world that way and I cannot even begin to understand why you would want to.
> With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.
Dude, no. Waymo, Pixel, Cloud, Photos, and Search are homegrown. YouTube was an acquisition - but comparing how much work has been done post-acquisition vs pre-acquisition it might as well also have been 100% in-house.
Your facts are seriously wrong here. Google is not acquiring finished businesses and extracting all the profit they can from them, PE-style; they're actually creating value.
> That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.
There are definitely things Google does which are illegal, like that Apple default search deal!
By and large, though, the company is wildly profitable because it offers services which its users find useful.
> The company that once represented the pinnacle of innovation has devolved into a symbol of corporate indifference
Although they may have been slow to publicly launch anything worthwile in AI, Gemini 2.5 Pro is SOTA.
I mean: AI is the hot topic atm ang Google arrived and are already owning everybody on many metrics.
I wouldn't discount yet a company which powers 70% of the world's smartphones and which knows how runs millions of servers.
They just proved with Gemini 2.5 Pro that the old dog can still learn a new trick. And then teach some to other dogs.