Not only lacking, but it is degraded from what we had 7 years ago.
Back in the days I used to tweak search query a bit and was getting different results. Now when one tweaks a query, they get the same results over and over again, thus rendering any search attempts useless.
Agreed, all the changes have made things worse for everything aside their bottom line, if there are any HUI/GUI/UX/UI/HCI people out there that think they can do better I'm holding a contest on Instagram, #icandobetterthangoogle, the prize? The global domination of the search industry :)
It's degraded so much that I have to wonder if it's just optimizing for a different set of users. If you do a natural language query for celebrity news, it works really well now.
Really for anyone going deeper it isn’t good. I know someone who works on patterns amongst celebs. Basically celeb news, but geekier. They have complained similarly about not being able to drill down for specific words. They already know the general celeb news so that doesn’t help.
In 1999, Google Web Search optimised for ~100 million users.
In 2019, Google Web Search optimised for ~10 billion users.
Expanding self-selected elite groups rarely sustains intelligence and skill levels.
This isn't a swipe at general intelligence, it's just a flat fact of mass media, one that's been widely recognised (though often lamented on a moral basis) for well over a century.
I've labled this "the tyranny of the minimum viable user".
The other factor is that manipulating the medium has become increasingly attractive. That's not just old-school SEO (black or white), but propaganda, psyops, and similar activities. Google are very much part of this battleground, and seem to have taken considerable time coming up to speed with even grasping this. I suspect they're now aware, if not sufficiently competent.
A friend, Woozle, has described this as a fundamental epistemic paradox as systems grow -- what was previously useful for a few becomes increasingly attractive to manipulators. Though Shoshana Zuboff's Three Laws predate their observations by about 30 years.
To be fair, this is likely not because their technology degraded, but rather these particular sites SEO's technology is vastly improved. They have probably automated their targeting so as to be highly ranked on even the most esoteric phrases.
It's so frustrating that Google auto-removes more and more words out of your query in order to increase "relevance". A lot of times, a search like "How to do <FEATURE> in <PRODUCT>" returns a bunch of results where it helpfully auto-removes "<FEATURE>" from the query rendering the results totally useless.
To be fair, you have to consider that the size of the web has continued to increase exponentially during the past 7 years, plus all the SEO tactics that are getting complex as the stakes are raised. Not an excuse to have a degraded service, but the challenge of just maintaining quality is huge.
Everything grows exponentially, but I could bet that the web had grown about 3X (between 2012 and 2019) given the first result I clicked given by Google.
Also given the fact that I worked for an SEO company I can definitely tell you that’s bot the money-making enterprise anymore since it mostly consisted of opportunists who happened to know about internet before anyone else before.
They should probably pay more attention to the people who actually pay their bills, too. Support for AdWords is basically non-existent. Good luck getting help with billing, too.
That's the power of having such huge scale compared to your customers. If a few people drop your product because of defects or poor service, it's just a rounding error in your profits and can simply be ignored. Meanwhile, the pressure to conform guarantees a critical mass can't accumulate for a boycott or other cooperative action against you. It is a market failure of a different category than Monopoly, but no less damaging.
Worth than 'support' they have people actively trying to convince you to do activities to googles benefit over your own. Those guys have lost their credibility.
Let then not pay attention. A gap in the market would be a great event for new comers. Isn’t that how google came to be - established search engines at the time became too disconnected from their end users, and google filled in the gap?
I don't think another company will make a better search product doing exactly the same thing Google does. But I do believe there is a real opportunity for, what I'd call a "decentralized" search product.
Just recently all of the search projects seem to have gotten significantly worse. Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options. Web search seems like a parody or cheap imitation anymore, presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude.
Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI.
On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.
Duck keeps improving since I ditched GSearch. Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for almost 20 years, the authoritative search engine.
Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.
> Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for 20 years
That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.
Unfortunately it also sometimes gives stupid answers to sensible queries but Google removed most knobs that let power users tune results. Instead they should leverage that expertise to better inform non-tweaked queries and results.
I agree, but lately I've noticed that DDG's results have been trending in the same direction. Maybe I'm just imagining things? (To be clear, I still find it generally better than Google for day-to-day search.)
I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.
I could imagine that the future of search engines is more specialization in different topics. As the content in the web keeps growing it only makes sense to only "search in a specific corner".
It makes sense because a search engine is a vastly expensive thing to run, there aren't enough users like you to be interesting to advertisers, and you aren't willing to pay the huge sums it would require to make such a niche (useless) search engine sustainable.
>presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude.
Is this some side effect from user-tailored search experience, for me personally Google still gives better results than eg DGG or Bing.
Can you give an example of better results? I've been using DDG exclusively for many years and have never failed to find the thing I'm searching for on the first page of results. What am I missing?
Whenever I try to search for anything now on Google I get the same article 20 times from different news outlets, but no substance to find the source of what the articles are talking about.
Search is a perpetual battle between the ranker and the content servers trying to game it. I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google.
> I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google.
I agree 100%. Sometimes though it feels like the Web itself is deteriorating as the bulk of new Internet users increasingly only care about a handful of social media platforms. Where's the "sources of truth" about website quality when we need them? We used to have DMOZ/ODP providing something like that, it had a lot of problems but by and large it worked. But now DMOZ is dead, and there's nothing as of yet to replace it.
Sure, but as we talk about usability and user experience, the point is Google is good in retaining users. Geeks aren't target audience for Google web search as well as for any other really big internet service.
Google Search needs to add an “advanced” mode or something. I’m sure their changes are increasing accessibility for most people, but the power user experience has definitely gone down.
On the other hand, there’s no profit motive there, so why would executives sign off on that.
The search service generates more revenue than the rest of ads together. (if I recall correctly from their previous statement, it is at least very close)
But the search revenue comes from ads. Or are you merely pointing out that search ad revenue is the largest piece of total ad revenue?
To be honest, I don't understand how everyone can remember the "quality" of their Google searches from 7 years ago. I can't even remember the quality from a year ago. The things I find most frustrating with search (such as maternity blogs being the first options when looking for medical information related to a newborn or tutorial sites being at the top of the results rather than the official language docs) rank highly because those are the things people are clicking on.
As an example, I think the crown on HN is more likely to read the official documentation rather than go to a site such as TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow. On the other hand, the average programmer most likely just wants to go to TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow and copy-paste the solution they are looking for. And I think there are many more average programmers than there are visitors to HN. From Google's point of view, they are giving the user what they want.
All that being said, it is easy to criticize Google, but dealing with search at the scale of the internet is non-trivial. It isn't clear to me that Google's algorithms from 7 years ago would do just as good of a job today as they did 7 years ago. There is a lot more junk and abuse online, people are figuring out ways to hack their search ranking or spamming useless articles.
I don’t recall Google’s search quality 7 years ago. I do recall it the first time I used Google. I also recall it when the Demand Media eHow/Livestrong content farm spam decimated their results.
One thing that’s worth pointing out, that most technical users miss, are the ads. If you are blocking ads in the results, you have a totally different search experience.
My read of the comment was that search-based-ads revenue >> all-other-ad-revenue -- banners, Android, etc.
Actually, the fact of search >> Android would be something of a surprise, and raises the question of whether or not mobile nets increased ads exposure or if it's just a profiling data collection platform.
On the consumer side of things, their eyeball-holding core is "the platform". This includes search, news, youtube, docs, Play, etc. Search is just a component of that.
It's not very different from FB: acquire eyeballs to look at ads, acquire usage data to target ads, with whatever accomplishes that goal. Search is a way for the user to, more or less, "pull" content from the platform - and everything else is a way for the platform to push content at the user. Nowhere in there is "being a good search engine" a core priority.
Indeed, I agree, depending on your age I guess you see Google as a search engine, if you are young enough to be in the AG generation, you may see them as a platform that happens to have a search engine attached to a device/car/media/photo/email/data platform.
Search is the content, advertising is the product. Much as with traditional media -- newspapers, radio, television. The "content" (news, music or talk, programming) is the draw, the advertising is the revenue generator. Newspapers spent a century experimenting with the "news hole" (the blanks in the advertising template into which news items were placed, with news going from as much as 90% of the space to as little as 20%. Traditionally, a 40/60 split (40% news, 60% ads) was common from ~1950 - 1990 or so, at least.
Economically, content is a public good, advertising is rents income. It seems to me that successful public-goods marketing requires such a pairing, though many problems can still remain due to incentives conflicts.
I've become fed up with Google search results lately. They very clearly want to provide me with an "answer" that keeps me on Google, rather than sending me away to the website I'm looking for. I've switched to DDG.
I feel like Google Search is barely usable without UBlock Origin. The first page and a half is often ads now, with organic results getting pushed further and further down.
This really highlights the true problem of monopoly - even Google itself had much better UI in the early/mid aughts before they had really demolished all competition, now that they are the monopoly it's how can we just squeeze more ad dollars out of each and every search result.
It's ironic that Google search has wound up looking very much like AltaVista did back around 2000 when Google first showed up and ate their lunch because they were able to provide a fast and lean search experience, with no ads!
Interesting isn't it?
The most exciting option seems to me if something they were trying to do proved to work well enough that they went on to much heavier investment to seize the opportunity. (Beta-bet?)
I feel like this is good for Google in the long term. I remember when their new CFO took charge a couple years back, she cut a lot of "excess" to make it more profitable, but some of the Google flavor is allowing employees to mess around on pet projects. Gmail is easily the best example of that.
It's important to understand that there's a difference between "R&D" as it lives in most people's minds here, and "R&D" as it presents in financial reporting. The former is associated with hiring PhD's and building labs. The latter is everything not covered by cost of sales. Different companies balance the buckets in different ways at different times. And there are many activities that fall under the latter that most would not associate with the former. Companies that make staples report R&D on their financials too. And companies that fund AI also do a lot of R&D that looks the R&D that goes into making staples.
well they have had an amazing run since 2001 - and during that time, they have grown to be a huge enterprise comprising of all services under the Google brand plus others such as Youtube. Extending into OS, some hardware, etc.
Still, 23% is a big decline so lets see how they fare from now onwards.
Wait, they spent extra $30 billions in a quarter for research, development and marketing?
"Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit, which missed Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said."
> Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit ... was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said.
> Google is spending heavily to hire employees, invest in data centers and pay for marketing of new products like its Pixel smartphones.
> Alphabet said it added about 6,500 employees in the quarter, for a total work force of about 114,000 people.
> The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a year ago.
Following Google's [ad-blocking restrictions](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430),
I switched from Chrome to Firefox and from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. It's been great so far, browsing in incognito mode by default. Gmail and Docs has been the hardest addiction to kick so far, but I've heard good things about Fastmail. More friends are following suit.
It may seem like we developers are in the minority, but the minority rule applies to us: tastemakers make the apps that run in your browser and you install Firefox on your parents' machines at thanksgiving.
Windows 10's forced-updates and telemetry are the main things preventing me from buying a Surface for my next machine. But I don't know how I'm going to get off my iPhone - the CPU is just too fast.
Remember, you are the market. You can vote with your eyeballs and your employment. Giving up salary is easier said than done, but no other profession has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.
Forced updates is a good thing. We want fast updates when a vulnerability is found. We see so many unpatched servers online getting pwnd and enslaved into botnets, and this is the only solution.
I'd prefer to manage my server myself. But thanks for your input about randomly rebooting my server and losing work being "the only solution". Also you can't fully disable telemetry. Even in server 2016 with sconfig you can set it to not be fully off. On windows 10 home edition I don't believe you really have the option without resorting to stuff like shutup10. Honestly your line of thinking is dangerous and misinformed.
You can use a raspberry pi or a configurable router to grab telemetry packets and kill them. Also you honestly want to take the quality updates (security and minor bug fixes) every day someone figures out a new intel exploit and you really want to get the patches to fix those. The feature updates take forever but Microsoft announced they will only push a feature update once your OS is approaching EOS.
"You can use a raspberry pi or a configurable router to grab telemetry packets and kill them" is not the same as "you can turn off windows telemetry" like the guy i was replying to.
I agree about the security updates. However, the point i was trying to make is that accepting windows' bullshit "you WILL have an update, you WILL give us telemetry, you WILL reboot your computer" is bullshit. Having those defaults, albeit i don't agree with them, but with an easy way to disable them so that even moderate power users can completely block out anything they don't want to in any edition of windows is much more preferable to the "it's fine" attitude i was replying to originally. It's not fine. It sucks. Forced updates are not the same as auto updates, and they're sure as hell not a good thing IMO.
The forced updates are much easier to control on Windows Pro than Home. And frankly, if you are doing mission critical stuff that can't be interuoted, you shouldn't be using Home anyway.
See, turning off telemetry (if it is even possible to turn it off fully) was implemented to be complex on purpose, so that most people can't do it and won't do it.
But Microsoft can still trumpet to the world that "you can turn it off if you want".
Single threaded geekbench is hardly a valid benchmark for mobile.
Also the 855+ has better 3D results at times. None of this is here to imply the A1x chips aren’t crushing their android counterparts at single threaded performance. They are likely wayyyy faster, but extra cores, sustained performance, 3D performance, and LTE performance all factor into the over performance of a device.
Protonmail is a superior user experience to Gmail, I switched a few years ago and I love it! Check it out, their mobile app experience is also INCREDIBLE, and I say that as a dev.
I do, to the extent that I won't work for a company that I believe is actively harming.
I've also chosen a salary cut for working for companies that I believe are actively helping.
Most of my IT friends think alike (which may be part of why we're friends ;-). For example a friend quit his job after realizing some things his work was enabling.
I have turned down immoral projects because I could afford to:
- a conference room proxy that intercepted and replaced HTTP ads
- an app for a quack that promoted a cancer cure
- a high-paying gig in gambling software,
- building a white-label browser that would give people in East Africa free airtime to punt horse-betting and hide its competitors' ads.
I thought moving my life off of Google was just too monumental of a task after being tied to them since the gmail beta invites, but yeah after like six months of no Google it's not really that big of a deal at all. Occassionaly DDG returns very bad results and you have to go back to the old search engine, but for the most part it's just really easy to avoid them.
Make sure you're using some sort of extension to block all of the Google analytics/trackers as well, they are on almost every site.
A year+ ago I switched to FF, DDG and Fastmail after briefly evaluating Protonmail. It was surprisingly easy. Fastmail works nicely on Lineage as well.
My hardest remaining FAAMG property to kick is Youtube, followed by maps.
Almost exactly the same experience. FastMail is definitely worth paying for, the custom domain ability is great and would make switching in future less painful. Firefox has never been better.
Don't delay, the sooner you make the switch, the better. I wish I'd done it earlier.
OpenStreetmap is improving, and the maps themselves are good.
Its search leaves an extreme amount to be desired. Recently, looking at the path of Typhoon Hagibis, I'd entered "tokyo japan". I was returned a restaurant in downtown Moscow, Russia.
Even direct latitude/longitude searches often fail completely (I've reported this as a bug), apparently if there's no reasonably local specific place record.
Where Google Maps will deal with a vague street + city or business-name + city reference, OSM is completely lost. Even comma-delimited "<city>, <state>, <country>" specifications often fail.
You can report these, and the reports do get attention. But there's a lot of work required of the team.
Firefox is smooth as butter on Mac OS with their latest update. Add unlock origin with default settings and privacy badger. It’s web the way it was intended to be!
89 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadBack in the days I used to tweak search query a bit and was getting different results. Now when one tweaks a query, they get the same results over and over again, thus rendering any search attempts useless.
In 2019, Google Web Search optimised for ~10 billion users.
Expanding self-selected elite groups rarely sustains intelligence and skill levels.
This isn't a swipe at general intelligence, it's just a flat fact of mass media, one that's been widely recognised (though often lamented on a moral basis) for well over a century.
I've labled this "the tyranny of the minimum viable user".
The other factor is that manipulating the medium has become increasingly attractive. That's not just old-school SEO (black or white), but propaganda, psyops, and similar activities. Google are very much part of this battleground, and seem to have taken considerable time coming up to speed with even grasping this. I suspect they're now aware, if not sufficiently competent.
A friend, Woozle, has described this as a fundamental epistemic paradox as systems grow -- what was previously useful for a few becomes increasingly attractive to manipulators. Though Shoshana Zuboff's Three Laws predate their observations by about 30 years.
Example: https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1182308994968428544
Also given the fact that I worked for an SEO company I can definitely tell you that’s bot the money-making enterprise anymore since it mostly consisted of opportunists who happened to know about internet before anyone else before.
Between Facebook, Twitter and other content silos, the internet as it was in 2002 is mostly gone.
Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI.
On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.
Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.
That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.
I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.
Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..
Is this some side effect from user-tailored search experience, for me personally Google still gives better results than eg DGG or Bing.
One quick tip: you can still access the old image size options on the Advanced Search
I agree 100%. Sometimes though it feels like the Web itself is deteriorating as the bulk of new Internet users increasingly only care about a handful of social media platforms. Where's the "sources of truth" about website quality when we need them? We used to have DMOZ/ODP providing something like that, it had a lot of problems but by and large it worked. But now DMOZ is dead, and there's nothing as of yet to replace it.
On the other hand, there’s no profit motive there, so why would executives sign off on that.
To be honest, I don't understand how everyone can remember the "quality" of their Google searches from 7 years ago. I can't even remember the quality from a year ago. The things I find most frustrating with search (such as maternity blogs being the first options when looking for medical information related to a newborn or tutorial sites being at the top of the results rather than the official language docs) rank highly because those are the things people are clicking on.
As an example, I think the crown on HN is more likely to read the official documentation rather than go to a site such as TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow. On the other hand, the average programmer most likely just wants to go to TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow and copy-paste the solution they are looking for. And I think there are many more average programmers than there are visitors to HN. From Google's point of view, they are giving the user what they want.
All that being said, it is easy to criticize Google, but dealing with search at the scale of the internet is non-trivial. It isn't clear to me that Google's algorithms from 7 years ago would do just as good of a job today as they did 7 years ago. There is a lot more junk and abuse online, people are figuring out ways to hack their search ranking or spamming useless articles.
One thing that’s worth pointing out, that most technical users miss, are the ads. If you are blocking ads in the results, you have a totally different search experience.
Actually, the fact of search >> Android would be something of a surprise, and raises the question of whether or not mobile nets increased ads exposure or if it's just a profiling data collection platform.
It's not very different from FB: acquire eyeballs to look at ads, acquire usage data to target ads, with whatever accomplishes that goal. Search is a way for the user to, more or less, "pull" content from the platform - and everything else is a way for the platform to push content at the user. Nowhere in there is "being a good search engine" a core priority.
Search is the content, advertising is the product. Much as with traditional media -- newspapers, radio, television. The "content" (news, music or talk, programming) is the draw, the advertising is the revenue generator. Newspapers spent a century experimenting with the "news hole" (the blanks in the advertising template into which news items were placed, with news going from as much as 90% of the space to as little as 20%. Traditionally, a 40/60 split (40% news, 60% ads) was common from ~1950 - 1990 or so, at least.
Economically, content is a public good, advertising is rents income. It seems to me that successful public-goods marketing requires such a pairing, though many problems can still remain due to incentives conflicts.
This really highlights the true problem of monopoly - even Google itself had much better UI in the early/mid aughts before they had really demolished all competition, now that they are the monopoly it's how can we just squeeze more ad dollars out of each and every search result.
Your theory suggests the problem is the top line, whereas the article suggests it's the bottom line.
The rest of Google is merely hiring like crazy.
Still, 23% is a big decline so lets see how they fare from now onwards.
"Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit, which missed Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said."
> Google is spending heavily to hire employees, invest in data centers and pay for marketing of new products like its Pixel smartphones.
> Alphabet said it added about 6,500 employees in the quarter, for a total work force of about 114,000 people.
> The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a year ago.
The article should have expanded on this...why did their tax rate go up if R&D and CapEx increased?
Too bad Google's research sector is actually pretty inspiring.
It may seem like we developers are in the minority, but the minority rule applies to us: tastemakers make the apps that run in your browser and you install Firefox on your parents' machines at thanksgiving.
Windows 10's forced-updates and telemetry are the main things preventing me from buying a Surface for my next machine. But I don't know how I'm going to get off my iPhone - the CPU is just too fast.
Remember, you are the market. You can vote with your eyeballs and your employment. Giving up salary is easier said than done, but no other profession has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.
Forced updates is a good thing. We want fast updates when a vulnerability is found. We see so many unpatched servers online getting pwnd and enslaved into botnets, and this is the only solution.
I agree about the security updates. However, the point i was trying to make is that accepting windows' bullshit "you WILL have an update, you WILL give us telemetry, you WILL reboot your computer" is bullshit. Having those defaults, albeit i don't agree with them, but with an easy way to disable them so that even moderate power users can completely block out anything they don't want to in any edition of windows is much more preferable to the "it's fine" attitude i was replying to originally. It's not fine. It sucks. Forced updates are not the same as auto updates, and they're sure as hell not a good thing IMO.
See, turning off telemetry (if it is even possible to turn it off fully) was implemented to be complex on purpose, so that most people can't do it and won't do it.
But Microsoft can still trumpet to the world that "you can turn it off if you want".
You what? Basically every flagship Android phone has a better CPU (clock speed / cores).
https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/14864886
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/14865026
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/14865059
The iPhone chips straight up are faster in practice in virtually every benchmark I've ever seen.
The OnePlus 7 Pro uses the Snapdragon 855+, which is the fastest Android chip I am aware of. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Also the 855+ has better 3D results at times. None of this is here to imply the A1x chips aren’t crushing their android counterparts at single threaded performance. They are likely wayyyy faster, but extra cores, sustained performance, 3D performance, and LTE performance all factor into the over performance of a device.
Interesting.
Curious how many people actually evaluate the morality of their prospective employers.
I've also chosen a salary cut for working for companies that I believe are actively helping.
Most of my IT friends think alike (which may be part of why we're friends ;-). For example a friend quit his job after realizing some things his work was enabling.
Purely anecdotal of course. But not nonexistent.
The really important part is that every interview has me honestly asking the interviewer about employee trust and revenue streams.
Make sure you're using some sort of extension to block all of the Google analytics/trackers as well, they are on almost every site.
My hardest remaining FAAMG property to kick is Youtube, followed by maps.
Don't delay, the sooner you make the switch, the better. I wish I'd done it earlier.
Its search leaves an extreme amount to be desired. Recently, looking at the path of Typhoon Hagibis, I'd entered "tokyo japan". I was returned a restaurant in downtown Moscow, Russia.
Even direct latitude/longitude searches often fail completely (I've reported this as a bug), apparently if there's no reasonably local specific place record.
Where Google Maps will deal with a vague street + city or business-name + city reference, OSM is completely lost. Even comma-delimited "<city>, <state>, <country>" specifications often fail.
You can report these, and the reports do get attention. But there's a lot of work required of the team.