The Mediocrity of Modern Google

https://om.co/2025/03/29/the-mediocrity-of-modern-google/

by mji • 1 year ago

49 26 1 year ago

om.co

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

Is this blowhard seriously going by just "Om" now? Pretentious level 9000.

alexpotato• 1 year ago

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...)

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

zeroCalories• 1 year ago

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.

summerlight• 1 year ago

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.

timewizard3• 1 year ago

"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.

SR2Z3• 1 year ago

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.

timewizard3• 1 year ago

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.

assimpleaspossi• 1 year ago

I wish I had a company as mediocre.

(I'm not saying I don't agree with the complaints.)

bilater• 1 year ago

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.

RobinL• 1 year ago

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)

qwertox• 1 year ago

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.

zoogeny• 1 year ago

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.

impure• 1 year ago

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.

TacticalCoder• 1 year ago

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.

jfengel• 1 year ago

"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.

mbrumlow2• 1 year ago

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.

paleotrope• 1 year ago

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.

siscia• 1 year ago

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.

cjs_ac• 1 year ago

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.

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

"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#...

fernly• 1 year ago

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.

dep_b• 1 year ago

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.

The Mediocrity of Modern Google

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