Googlisms

Google does two things very well: search (which they’re now ruining) and maps. They talk a lot about how “innovative” they are, yet they’ve failed to come up with anything new since Maps. Me-too projects like Sheets and Docs don’t count. There’s nothing really new or revolutionary about half-baked and bug-ridden garbage like Hangouts, Chrome, Drive, etc. YouTube and Android are not Google inventions so they don’t count, either.

I used to love Google. Really, I did. That was back in the day when they lived by their now-empty motto to “do no evil” (about which many others have written) [Update: Google dropped the motto in the early 2020’s. Imagine that!]. Coming soon [out now] is a documentary by called “Creepy Line” by Peter Schweizer. The title is based on the words of former Google CEO (and current advisor) Eric Schmidt said in an interview that the company’s strategy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”. Sorry, Eric. You guys crossed that line a long time ago. There is NO privacy with Google. That’s the price people pay for “free stuff”. Sadly, way too many people seem to be OK with that.

For a company that pretty much prints money nowadays, greed has won the day and Google’s motto is just window dressing. YouTube and Android, now owned by Google, were not Google inventions. Their G-suite has attracted a lot of users looking for an alternative to MS Office (LibreOffice and OpenOffice are better alternatives). People who don’t know any better are happy to share all of their personal files with Google, giving up their privacy, in exchange for a “free” suite of half-baked software.

I no longer use any Google products (except for YouTube) because I value my privacy and I like my software to work as expected. I also like software that’s installed on my own computers. I went so far as to ditch my Samsung Galaxy S7 (not even a year old) for an iPhone 7+. Google claims to only hire “the smartest people in the world”. If that’s so, why do their products suck so bad? Very few Google employees are under 40 so the majority of their workforce has little real-world experience. It seems that they’re in such a hurry to roll out a new product that they don’t bother to do the debugging until it’s already been released.

I have finally compiled a list of what I call “Googleisms”. I hope you enjoy them:

Political Concerns: While most of these Googlsims poke fun at their shitty software, some important points regarding Google’s business plan need to be addressed first.

Google top brass spent a LOT of time (more than any other entity) in the Obama White House. They also manipulate search results to favor political candidates. This behavior should invite public scrutiny more than any other.

When Google’s employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no

recourse when they have been harmed.

Google once pledged to “do no evil”, but greed (or maybe “social justice” blinders) seems to have killed that idea. Google is now censoring search results, not just in China but right here in the USA. How many people know this? The word needs to be spread far and wide. Google isn’t the only search engine out there, folks.

startpage.com and bing.com are quite good. Bing also has its own maps. I used to like duckduckgo but they jumped on the censorship bandwagon so I ditched them too.

And now for the Googeisms. First, I should point out that I had to use this garbage when I was working as a temp for a Google vendor. Google makes shitty software but at least they make their employees use it.

Everything here is public knowledge or at least can be verified by using publicly-available products.

Google Calendar: When selecting an event, it asks if I’m attending, even if I’ve already RSVP’d.

Hangouts: Sound didn’t work on Chromebook for some reason, even though the system’s sound effects still did.

Tested on a Chromebox, the sound worked just fine. By the way, the Chromebook did do something the Chromebox could never do: it remembered by wallpaper setting.

One day, a job recruiter attempted to contact me via Hangouts for a “face-to-face” chat. Of course it didn’t work. Skype worked fine did so don’t blame the Android phone. Later on when I looked at the screen, I noticed that Hangouts had left a gray box with little icons of a microphone and a camera. There was no way to get rid of the box without rebooting.

Chrome: Very few customization options, nothing close to what Firefox offers. Sending Google all your browsing history, I don’t understand why anyone would use it. Speaking of browser history, Chrome offers a half-baked history menu that seems to remember only the most recent 3 or 4 pages and even then it’s hit and miss. For example, I was looking at a certain webpage. I closed the tab. A few minutes later, I wanted to see that page again but it was nowhere to be found in the truncated history menu. With Firefox and every other browser I’ve ever used (and that list is longer than most folks’) I can find any page I have visited over the past week or more. Not with Chrome.

Drive: Allows me to save the same document with the same name, multiple times. When used within ChromeOS, users must take two different routes to attach a file. One must click on the paperclip icon if it’s anything other than a G-Suite document but they must click on the Google drive icon if it is a G-Suite doc. Even whenthe two different documents are in the same folder, one must follow two different ways to attach them. Talk about unexpected behavior.

Gmail: Oh, where to start? What a shitty interface. They call that “intuitive”? No folders but silly “labels”. Notifications that never disappear until you acknowledge them (this is a ChromeOS “feature” too). I guess people like Gmail because a helluva lot of people seem to be using it, even after they were outed for scanning messages in order to target ads to their users. Why do people still trust them? They didn’t come out and admit this themselves, they got caught. I had to get a Gmail account some years back when I got my first Android phone. I never use it, but it’s required if one wants to install any of the thousands of applications in their “Play Store”.

G-Suite: Always creating “untitled document” files because of the stupid auto-save feature. Nobody uses “.gdoc” or “.gsheet” files so they always have to be converted to .docx or .xlsx if one plans to email them to anyone else. Sadly, they manage to fuck that up too. Formatting styles are often lost during these conversions.

Sheets: Column filter often cannot find matches when CTRL-F does. It also crashes if you try to paste more than ~ 49k lines of data (only 5-10 columns wide). I’ve never seen a spreadsheet crash so easily.

Docs: Some of the most rudimentary tasks are either absent or hidden. Whilst testing this garbage, I tried to adjust the view zoom. I don’t know where Google has hidden this gem but in every word processor I’ve ever used, it’s usually in the drop-down View menu. I clicked “help” and it offered to search the menus for me. I typed “zoom” and it presented me with a list of zoom options (50%, 75%, etc.) That’s nice, but I’d really like to know where I can expect to find that command in the menu without having to click “help”.

ChromeOS: Often forgets user-defined settings like the wallpaper and even security certificates.

Their their half-baked version of a taskbar can supposedly also show “quick launch” icons, just don’t expect it to always work. Eventually, all it will do is take you to the “Store” where you can install it (even when it’s already installed).

File types. If one installs an application that becomes associated with a particular file type and then uninstalls it, Chrome will still offer to open those files for you with the no-longer-installed application.

There is no actual taskbar but what they call a “shelf” where icons representing open applications live. However, since almost all ChromeOS applications live in the Chrome browser, the only icon that usually shows up is the chrome Icon. All of the open Chrome windows are listed here under one shelf icon. However, the icon will only show the open tabs on the open windows. Say you have a Chrome window open with two tabs, one for Fox News and the other for YouTube. The currently-visible tab is YouTube. You want the window that has Fox News but it doesn’t show up anywhere on the shelf unless you manually click on every browser open and check all their tabs.

And may God help you if you happen to have a lot of windows open and ending up opening the same document twice.

ChromeOS has no problem with you having two windows open at the same time with the same document being edited.

I’ve never seen an operating system do this.

Way to go, guys. Another half-baked product full of suck. Maybe if the smartest people in the world would put down the ping-pong paddles and get to work, they might just kill some of the bugs that are piling up.

It’s small wonder nobody takes this sorry excuse for a computer seriously. My phone and tablets run circles around ChromeOS.

Maps Navigation: I’ve blogged about this elsewhere but it should be mentioned here too. The smartest people on Earth want us to believe they can build a car that drives itself and they’re already working on prototypes (of course they’re not the only company throwing money down this rabbit hole).

Before trying to build a self-driving car, I suggest they get navigation right first. Granted, it works very well most of the time but accuracy gets worse the closer you get to your destination. Ask any delivery driver who uses it and they’ll tell you that from time to time, navigation can be very inaccurate. One of the biggest bugs (Google probably calls it expected behavior) is when the address is not found but the street is.

Navigation won’t bother to tell you that it can’t find the exact address but it’s happy to guide you to a random spot on the street in question. Had I known in advance that they can’t find the address, I could have called ahead to get directions. A few years back, I used it navigate to an airport. It led me directly to the control tower gate. More recently, my wife and I tried to navigate to a park in a city we were visiting. Maps Navigation led us to the employee only entrance, several blocks away from the public entrance. I can only imagine my rage if my “self-driving” car did this.

Google Voice: Offered as an alternate phone service, complete with a unique phone number and all (as if we need Google listening to our phone calls too). It’s “default” greeting plays a woman’s voice (British accent for some reason) who gives a generic message about how the “the Google Voice subscriber is not available…” However, if you ever create a “name” (just a name, not a greeting), Google Voice will use that as the default and unless you listen to your own voicemail greeting, you’ll never know. Four months after leaving a company, my wife said my voicemail greeting still mentioned the other company (!). I didn’t believe her so I dialed my own number from her phone to hear it for myself. I couldn’t figure out why it was doing this until I did an internet search and found a discussion thread where someone says the behavior is by design. If that’s the case, Why does Google still play the British lady’s voice when I listen to the greeting? And where is this setting that has my name and (former) company? I can’t change it? Ever? Would it be too hard to have it play back the actual greeting? Whilst searching the net for an answer, I found others asking the same question going back a few years. That’s years, with no fix.

Today, I have voicemail disabled completely until my carrier can figure out that when I block a number, that also means that I don’t want them to be able to leave a message (but I’ll leave that rant for another day).

I’ll add more as the shit-show continues. I’m sure Google will give me more material sooner or later. After all, they have “only the smartest people in the world” working for them.