(1) Stop “CHANGING” the user interface.

(2) Provide FULL options to turn OFF your annoying “inventions” not just one or two “options.”

(3) Stop making things “prettier” stop wasting screen real estate and instead FIX your existing web products.

Yesterday’s fallout – for me – was a disaster. I actually had to do some reSEARCH, and i only use google for searching the web. Specially since i’m using the advanced search operators and it usually doesnt take me long to find what im looking for. However while realising what was going on with google, i switched to live and yahoo. After 30 minutes i got up from my office desk and went to an early lunch, partly because i was hungry :P, and mainly praying google would be up and running again by the time i got back. Using live and yahoo for the first time in a while made me see why and how much i love google. I honestly dont see them as a real alternative to google, at least not for real searching.

As far as all these attacks to google being big brother go:
1. their services are FREE. so if they want to collect information about what i search and click, wtf do i care? they cant go as far as really identifying me. plus, yahoo and live to it do, its just not that much into the media.
so if anyone keeps complaining about “oh my privacy and the drama” – stop using google.
2. their services, as very well stated above – are without a doubt competition-less. but they are still free. i don’t get spam in gmail, i dont get advertising emails from their “marketing partners”, i get the emails im supposed to get.
3. a while ago i have deployed the enterprise version of desktop search, custom search, and gdocs on a network of 60 people and it’s all free, and running smoother than anything else i have tried.

so in conclusion, stop bitching so much. if you dont like it, dont use it. go pay for something similar and see if you get something better.

Clusty.com
Alltheweb.com
jux2.com

Also, turn off those notifications and rely on more sound techniques, like sandboxie, geswall, and whois.

I’ll decide what’s evil and what’s not, and Google is trying hard to be evil. FYI, Google and Yahoo are both running on ghacks.

The problem. Some of their products are just too good. GSearch – no competitors. Gmail, GCal – superb. GReader – perfect. Google Docs could use some (a lot of) improvement but every time I try an alternative I come sheepishly back. Live Maps has some really nice features but still not enough to make it my regular mapping feature.

As for self-hosting things like email – true GMail has the occasional outage/hiccough but I’ve had much more trouble with self-hosted email over the years. Now that Google’s hosting it, I’m much happier with what I have (while still keeping local backups). The minor stuff I can take or leave but I certainly don’t trust the alternatives any more. Small ones (see Ma.gnolia) don’t have the infrastructure and big ones (Delicious, Flickr owned by Yahoo) have the same issues as Google.