The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I inevitably switch…
FWIW Searx is a really decent alternative for search, plus it's open source and can be self-hosted
For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
> blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy. For general vocabulary, very likely. I believe Google Translate's competitive edge comes in the form of figuring out translations for jargon, slang, etc. from equivalent-corpus context. I like to think of Google Translate as a keyword extractor on steroids. It doesn't necessarily give you the right prose, but it does better than anything I know of at giving you the…
Don't know about slang, but I recently translated some technical documentation from German to English. I was surprised how many specific terms deepl knew, and even if it failed at that the grammar surrounding the offending term was still mostly correct. It was night and day compared to Google. Bag of words describes it well.
Google Drive/Docs is infamous for its stagnation over the years. However, probably the most "WTF" moment I've ever had with it is the fact that the search on it is absolute horrendous. Like until very recently it couldn't find the files or folders I was searching for unless I typed like 80%+ of the name or something.
Amazing to see this level of incompetence in a product from a ... search company.
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest. Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good. Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near…
This is getting old now.
Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive. * It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily. * Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. * Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find th…
> Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically name…
That sounds more like a process issue than a technology issue. The tools to manage this exist in the tech but mixing access, not restricting access, and other issues that persist in file shares, shared email boxes, mirroring AD access for new users, etc are the same issues as an old gmail that gets 1000 spam emails a day; it's a mess that needs to be audited and overhauled which is easiest by jumping to a new system/platform when able.
No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…
> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in th…
I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?
Google was the oppositive of boring: - GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air - Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before - Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before - Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of t…
> You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. I don't, and neither does wikipedia: Gmail: April 1, 2004 IPO: Aug 19, 2004 Maps: February 8, 2005 Translate: April 28, 2006
GP is probably confusing the creation of Alphabet, Inc. with the IPO of Google.
Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN I haven't seen many complaints at all.
My opinion: Yes, it's true. - Canceling accounts, leaving people with the "Post it to HN and pray" customer support option. - Focusing more on growth than long-term support. See the original article for examples of this. - Taking their originally fast, svelte, and compliant web browser and injecting more and more features that are virtually required by Google domains, memory/CPU bloat, and privacy hostile tracking/te…
You're still talking about users within tech circles, which I'm not doubting has lost trust in Google. However, my mom or my siblings wouldn't understand what any of those points even mean.
> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.
This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs. I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating syst…
> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas.
So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.
LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.