I never -- personally -- used much of Google aside from the search engine. Never GMail. I watched them buy and kill things I was interested in well over a decade ago. At work, I noticed how hard it was to get Chrome off of a machine when first installed and decided against that. Then they rather unceremoniously discontinued their search appliance without giving us much of a transition path, on very short notice, and that was something of a bummer.

I used to attend search engine conferences, with special talks given by someone who spent a lot of time analyzing Google's "special sauce." It became increasingly clear to me that search serves the ads, and everything else is a either a distraction or a temporary step in improving search and/or ads.