The Mediocrity of Modern Google

Summary

These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it? The company that once represented the pinnacle of innovation has devolved into a symbol of corporate indifference. Let me share a personal example that illustrates this decline. I was an early Webpass customer. Back then, before Google acquired it, the service was everything you’d want from an ISP – fast, reliable, and customer-centric. And cheap. The founder himself picked up the phone whenever there was a problem. Usually, there wasn’t. Post-acquisition? It’s a different story. While competitors like Sonic push boundaries with 10 Gbps offerings in San Francisco, Google Fiber’s Webpass feels stuck in time, content with its 1 Gbps speeds and raising prices. The service interruptions have become far too frequent. It is enough of a headache that we are talking about it on our condo complex’s internal message board. For someone who lives on the internet (like most of us do these days), this is more than an inconvenience – it’s a dealbreaker. But Webpass is just a symptom of a larger malaise at Google. Take Search, once the company’s crown jewel. Using Google Search in 2025 feels like death by a thousand cuts – each query returning not answers, but an endless stream of AI-generated reviews and ads. Sure, this approach might please Wall Street analysts, but it’s pushing users straight into the arms of ChatGPT and its ilk. The company’s recent Gemini announcement perfectly encapsulates this problem. Despite technically impressive benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic – companies that understand how to capture both technical excellence and public imagination – continue to dominate the AI narrative. Even Microsoft, not historically...