By "this", do you mean an intuitive natural-language one-stop-shop to get information from across all of Google's properties? Seems like pretty terrific UX design to me.

Or by "this" did you mean Tips -- i.e. is your argument that you shouldn't ask your users for discoverability advice? If so, I can see how doing so requires a bit of indifference to embarrassment, and a lack of care as to what snobs might think, but hey, discoverability is hard.

How would you design a way to teach users they can do queries like this?

I don't know if you have multiple google accounts (I have personal gmail, personal analytics and some work related accounts).

Try this: Go to Google.com as a logged in user and try to "switch" to your new account. What was originally one click to logout and one click to bring up a un/pw now takes a ton of additional user interaction.

I'm no Jony Ive but whoever thought this was a good workflow needs to reconsider.

I have two accounts: my personal account and a work account. Until a few minutes ago, I had never signed in to my work account from my home computer.

I tried to "switch" to my new account, as you described. It took about 10 seconds, which was the time it took to load a new page and type out my credentials. Furthermore, as soon as I did that, I could instantly switch between accounts with two clicks and without having to log out of either account. What's the problem?

My point is that the solution before was more elegant, since it was just a pop-up flow with single clicks to log out and log in. The whole rigmarole now is just the way all the Google apps feel to me now. Extra hoops to jump through, I guess I'd describe it as?

Fair enough; I can see your point. I think the other side of the coin is that, once you've logged into all your accounts, it's much easier to switch back and forth between accounts.

The fact that someone thought this comment was necessary emphasizes how much people underestimates how to create a good experience design.

Google has an incredible user experience considering its depth (although many would argue that being feature rich is a negative when it comes to user experience design, take Netflix's UI for example, which has only become simpler over time).

This reminds me heavily of the IFTTT recipes (https://ifttt.com/recipes). Google has so many parts that sometimes you need a little guidance to see how they fit together in a useful way.

I prefer to see it as a way to improve UX by learning what the confusions/unknown features are.