Agreed, Google Finance is garbage. I talked with a Google recruiter and asked if there were any positions at Google Finance, and she thought I meant in the Finance department, not on that particular site. There's so much that can be done with it, and Google has abandoned it.

When will I stop being even slightly surprised that Google has abandoned yet another one of it's sites?

It's not abandoned. They did a redesign that power users don't like.

> There's so much that can be done with it, and Google has abandoned it

Does anyone know the inside ballgame on this one?

Simply- google has outgrown it. No inside info but it’s unlikely that finance.google.com will ever grow past $xxx million/billion revenue per year, so its more profitable for google to keep rolling the dice on chat services.

How about "all the world information" ? :)

Not abandoned, lost interest. They have no incentives to work on projects after the fun wares off.

Not just finance.

Compare Google Street View with Apple's "look around" feature. Night and day. To be fair I haven't looked at street view recently, and Google's coverage is better for now.

Or Gmail spam filtering... I can't even begin to fathom what they are thinking, whoever is in charge of that. I mean really... they have the privilege of working at Google? And... really, that's the level of effort and quality they give us, after 20 years of time with the problem?

Yes I know it can be a hard problem, and an arms race, but the level to which they are utterly falling down with good signals in the data, like the fact that I explicitly signed up for and sometimes read and reply to a mailing list, is mind boggling.

With Google in particular, I feel like you can tell when a new lead takes over a product. I imagine leading a product is a career move at Google, people move on and new folks take over, diluting the original vision of simplicity, functionality and magic of early Google products.

In Google Maps on Android, the status bar is now transparent, and important information like clock, battery status, connection quality and incoming messages are now drawn on top of the map. I'm sure that looks great in a presentation but now those little icons have little, and varying contrast and are hard to decipher.

In Youtube in the browser, I have autoplay disabled. Every time I log into Youtube (after a reboot), autoplay is enabled again.

I was able to see it in autocomplete, so that's something:

https://imgur.com/a/dJFuNqW

You are right that simply typing "work" and hitting enter returns no results, though.

Surely they could just list the autocomplete suggestions as search results though, no? Why is it so incredibly broken?

Especially amazing since it used to be pretty good. The former codebase must have been an absolute mess for Google to throw it away in favor of the garbage that exists now.