Eh...Google even 5 years ago was 10x more useful to me than they are now. No exaggeration.

Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing.

Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess).

Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.

I remember there was a time when googling was so intelligent it seemed like it was going to become self aware! Dunno what happened along the way but the last few years it’s like a giantfairly sophisticated grep coupled with a bunch of sponsored links.

SEO happened.

All that tells me is that the problem space evolved and Google didn’t keep ahead of it. Same as what happened to Yahoo(!) before them ... my point was that Google was a very intelligent platform and now less so. Perhaps they just decided they could coast on the SEO ...

sometimes I feel that way, but a quick trip to DDG or Bing reminds me that while Google has felt regressive, they are still the kings of showing me what I want up front.

This is balloney. For a regular user google is 10x better than it ever was. Search intent, voice search, user based predictions. Get real. I understand quote searching for lines of code doesnt work like it used to but thats not where google makes money

As mostly a casual user of these products, can you speak to how search and maps have degraded?

Plus they could easily survive for decades fulfilling only the niche market who cares about privacy. They may never need to be the "big fish", which will involve compromising their users security, and therefore lose a lot of their value proposition.

Even having 1-5% of the search market is a pretty great business. Not everyone needs to be Google-scale to be a success.

Does anyone know if there's folks working to build a better mousetrap where search is a protocol that anyone could use, not a company service?

If you are thinking about decentralized search, it already exists in some P2P networks (ex: Kademlia)

However, it is nowhere as effective as commercial services. So much that the most effective way of finding pirate stuff is often to Google them despite all the copyright takedowns.