There was a time when the YouTube “recommended” list was quite good (around 2011-2013), that’s how I discovered lots of very interesting music back then. In the meantime things have gone considerably downhill.

I've noticed this too, and not just with Google. Same with Amazon and many other big tech companies.

I've wondered why, and the only thing I can think of is that they are all jumping to machine learning, and the results are worse than the old-fashioned algorithms.

Loon, Waymo, and Stadia seem pretty sexy, for entirely new product spaces. And within the current products AR maps, digital assistant, and AI auto complete in Gmail are pretty cool but I guess that's highly dependent on what you as an individual would care about.

Stadia you say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Gmail was the sexiest thing when it launched. I remember I was so desperate for the Beta invite.