I don't see the problem with building new products, Google was just search in the beginning. The problem arises when you screw your original product by tacking everything else onto it.

What if Google turned into Yahoo.com?

Google’s core product is still essentially unchanged since its inception, for the most part, except for ads.

Uh that’s a REALLY bad example, given how much Google indeed HAS tacked everything else onto their core product. How many ads do you have to scroll past for the first real result? Are you certain the results are good, or are they skewed by some weirdness in your login, since they track all your searches now, to “personalize” (target) results (ads)?

Google’s core product was a text box into which you could type anything and get something useful in the first few results. That product no longer exists.

It still exists for me. There’s no comparable search engine at the moment, it’s still the best at what it does and the format hasn’t changed (except for ads, as I mentioned)

It’s still the same old list of links that has been enhanced to highlight the first result or the most recent news. Over 20 years that’s merely evolution.

Dropbox turned from invisible into its own app separate from the OS. Don’t you see how, comparatively, Google Search hasn’t changed?

give duckduckgo a shot for say one week.

I just don’t trust the results google returns.

Sometimes I still !g something but rarely get a better matching result.

I did and it's never good enough for me. I just re-did my last non-trivial search on ddg and none of the first page results were useful.

Yep like Google Plus and Google Video.