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While I agree that DDG should keep it simple, two of the three Google examples you've given -- Gmail and Maps -- are products I rely heavily on, and am glad Google decided to branch out for those two products alone.

I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful examples, like:

- Privacy practices - Adsense/Adwords - Search personalization "features" - Docs - Buzz - Jaiku - Wave - etc...

2 comments

Google docs is amazing.

Adsense? Are you serious? Google isn't a search engine. It's an ads engine.

Without Adsense, there is no Google. Everything else is just a platform for it.

Not sure what you're arguing. I was using Adsense as an example of a toxic product from Google.

Perhaps toxic, but Adsense/Adwords are what make Google possible. Without revenue there's no Google.

The dis-proportionality of contextual pay per click revenue has financed Google's excursions in to all of these other areas.

One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those search results.

Have the search results degraded that much in your opinion? I still find their results the most useful.

96% of revenue in the most recent quarter came from Advertising. If Google hadn't pioneered contextually relevant advertising it would likely be bankrupt today (as no VC would front the money it costs to run and maintain the datacenters powering search today).

The search results are a hell of a lot better than they were a year or two ago. Content farm results, gone! Thank Jebus.