Google is no longer the darling that it once was. While it’s still clearly a huge, powerful and (generally) helpful company, it’s trending the wrong way.
Business Insider compares Google to lumbering giants like IBM, and last year I shared how Google’s treatment of RSS ended up being horrible for the health of the internet at large.
With Google becoming more sensitive to revenue and keeping shareholders happy, it’s making all of their services worse. We all all know how cluttered search results are becoming with ads, but there’s a relatively small thing on Android phones that showcases it even better — the slow death of “Google Now”.
Google Now?
For those not familiar with Google Now, it was a feature on Android phones (and iPhones for a while too) that was absolutely brilliant. You could swipe right on your home screen and Google would tell you tons of relevant information — info about your upcoming flights, weather, packages being shipped to you, concerts coming to your area that you might like, sports scores, and tons of other useful info. It was smart, personal, and very helpful.
Here’s an example of some of those cards from an article on Search Engine Journal back in 2012:
Or going further, here is MKBHD talking about Google Now in a video from 2013:
It was great!
Where is it?
The problem is that Google has slowly fazed it out in favor of “Google Discover”. When I swipe right on my Pixel home screen today, I get a bunch of algorithm-generated news articles to read. They’re somewhat relevant, but nothing even close to the value that Google Now brought, and for one big reason — money.
Google has the “Discover” area full of ads and click-bait, which pays the bills much better than my flight info and package delivery. Here is a shot of my “Discover” page at the time of this writing:
It’s not awful; I have an Android phone, I sometimes play city-builder games, and I have interest in learning more about Apple’s Vision Pro. However, you can quickly see how useless that screen is compared to what Google Now used to offer, but you can also see how Google is trying to make money from this instead of just offering me a great tool.
Google is continuing to head the wrong way. Their AI has had major issues lately, their search results continue to get worse, and you can’t trust that any product of theirs will exist tomorrow (here are 293 products that they’ve killed over the years).
I still have my Pixel, I still use Gmail, and life without Google Calendar would be chaotic. However, I’m trying to slowly de-Google myself as time goes on, as I don’t want to get caught having to frantically move to a new service if they kill something that I rely on.
Google still has a lot going for them, but their push of “cash over value” is becoming more clear every day, making them less important and easier to leave.
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