I still remember when Google launched, the uncluttered homepage was the real differentiator, other search engines, especially AltaVista, were just as good at the time, but they would load their homepage with as much extra stuff as they could think of to attract people. Then Google came along with a quirky name (for the time) and a uniquely minimalist look that broke all the established rules, it wasn't necessarily better search at that point but it really looked different. Different times of course, a search engine was just another website, no different to your own personal page.

If google were just a search engine still, there wouldn't be a problem. But they are much much more now. Plus they suck at doing the thing they were supposed to do, i.e. searching.

Capitalism cannot allow good. Good is not profitable. We must extract, squeeze, enshittify until the very end.

I dunno. Milk can age into cheese if done right.

I'd say it aged like a badly discarded biohazard container.

It's all about market capture, then anything they want.

Well that aged like milk. Google is primarily an advertising company now.

The 2007 acquisition of Doubleclick is the watershed moment that converted Google from a competitor into a monopoly of the Internet ecosystem.

When it was cool to google....

Eh, their home page is still very clean, as described in the picture.