The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.
Google also debuted a new Driving Mode on Google Maps that... entirely changes the UI of of the app and several parts of the phone interface itself. I have never had to look at my phone while driving more in my entire life. It's my fault for using the phone, but it very nearly caused 2 accidents for me this weekend as I tried to get google maps to update or display a particular UI. I truly wonder what is going on over there -- I try not to assume bad intent but a lot of this stuff feels almost violently anti-user.<p>Edit: you can and should turn it off in settings: <a href="https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/assistant-driving-mode" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/assist...</a>
This is assuming malice when you could assume incompetence (to whatever slight degree this stuff is).<p>Probably these things got put in a future release, or are in the backlog still. Well meaning product designers wanted them and can't have them or some other typical big-co reason a product gets little iteration.
Or, you know, they happen to have a pretty good search solution and don't want to spend time and risk building something else. Large organizations nearly cannot change course, that's why the blowups are so spectacular and seem so dumb (ex: Kodak).
I have always been in the "search" camp. Even on my local hard drive, grep and locate are my tools of choice.<p>So, no need for Google to prefer a search-based approach. In fact, I will gladly give up all my organization tools for better search, and that's why I am happy with Google's way. I actually dislike most of their UI decisions, like I hate most of the modern web/electon app design, not just Google's. But search-over-organization, love it.<p>I wouldn't call it a dark pattern, just not a pattern suitable for the author. I would like to say, go find something else, Google is about search and has always been, but unfortunately, the options are limited. Maybe because Google is so successful, most of the other big names go search-first, but do it poorly. They don't search as well as Google, and don't have good organization tools.
I’m honestly very okay with this “search-first” mentality the author claims Google promotes.<p>I’ve never organized my photos anymore thanks to Google Photos amazing search, no more time wasted organizing windows media player albums like in the old times thanks to Spotify, I never organize my notes on Notes app but can always find old stuff, my Google Drive is a bit more organized but still I basically go by recent items or search all the time<p>I think we are just so overwhelmed with information nowadays it’s impossible to keep organizing it, why not let machines just find what we want?<p>Now I do agree that browsers search on bookmarks sucks, and I like a lot to bookmark everything so I can find it later, building my own personal index, to solve that I built an extension that crawls my bookmarks and allows me to search better on them later (it’s called Cataloger if you are interested)
One thing to note is that the bookmark manager the article describes is <i>Chrome's</i> bookmark manager rather than Google Bookmarks, which, remarkably, is still around given Google's penchant for killing products that don't work out. It looks almost the same as when it launched in 2005. The "Gooooogle" links at the bottom, for example, still use the old serif logo.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/bookmarks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/bookmarks/</a>
I can't speak to Chrome's handling of bookmarks one way or the other, but the author fundamentally misunderstands both the history of Drive and its current application.<p>Regarding history: Drive had tags early on and a lack of hierarchical folder categorization (think of "files sorted like email messages" instead of "files sorted in a hierarchy"). Users pushed back with a very clear demand for folders, so Google implemented them (at which point, tags are redundant). 100% of the functionality of tags exists via folders and the ability to use Shortcuts (select a doc in Drive and shift-Z) to assign a file to multiple folders.<p>Regarding current application: Drive syncs to filesystems of major OSes and is therefore constrained somewhat in supporting features that are maintainable across multiple OS filesystem abstractions. I don't doubt Google <i>could</i> find a way to implement the wishlist the author describes, but the value / cost ratio is questionable.<p>Author's claim of lack of support for folder colors is also just false. I agree that his full laundry-list isn't present, but folder colors are accessible by right-clicking on a folder in the Drive UI and selecting "Change color".<p>All of that having been said, the author's own app seems to be well-positioned to address those wants so I'm not sure why they are making wild guesses at Google's intentions instead of just taking advantage of the big, lumbering megacorp being big and lumbering and back-filling those features for users.
Could we use this as a place to suggest alternatives to Google Maps?<p>I have tried OpenStreetMaps (albeit 5+years ago) and couldn't search for an address. So if that's improved I'd like to know.<p>I don't need/want "find X near me" or fluff like "what restaurant's are open right now?".<p>All I want is navigation between current location and target address.
Flip side - Google Keep.<p>To search for a note you have to press the search box <i>twice</i>. First time you just get types of things - if you want to search free text you have to press again.<p>I'd argue that UI encourages using tags over search.<p>It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
I’ve noticed the inverse: when I replaced the Chrome new tab page with a custom .html file, I suddenly found myself using Google Search much less, using Google URL suggestions much less, and syncing less data to Google servers. The difference between a useless new tab page and a decent one had a real impact on my habits.<p>Similarly, when I switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps, the favorites UI was enough better that I started using it more and relying on search less.<p>There’s definitely a pattern of Google underperforming in ways that make you fall back on Google Search, sending Google data, and viewing Google ads.
I have always been wondering why searching in bookmarks doesn't search the linked pages. It seems such an obvious feature for a company that makes both a search engine and a browser.
This is why I use a self-hosted bookmark manager like Shiori, although I concede that I haven't found an ideal bookmark manager yet. I wish Chrome would have never built both its own bookmark manager and password manager, as well as Firefox. I believe those types of tasks are best left up to the community, and that for the most part web browsers should not be trying to re-invent what is already there.
macOS takes the same approach with Finder however. Managing files in macOS is a huge pain if you want to keep it in some nicely organized tree. Its optimized for just searching to find what you're looking for. It presents all files in a flat list by default.<p>Apple's primary business model is not search, so there could be some evidence that more people just prefer search over tags/folders/icons etc.
The same goes for Google Photos. Instead of providing folders and other organisational features known for human kind for thousands of years, Google removes them. But not only to use search for pleasure. It is also to train their neural networks maybe?<p>We have to become compulsive hoarders, to train a bot that will help us find things, we could put in the right place in the first place.
This is just the MVP culture we now have where only the very basics are implemented and nothing more. Whereas a computer used to be a power tool to maximise human capability, modern devices are now designed to subvert the user’s desires for the benefit of mega-corp by making users helpless.
Essentially all the folders and organization for Google Docs happens through Google Drive. So you have to keep switching between the two. Why is the Google Drive interface not embedded in Google Docs instead of that dumb list of documents?
I always wondered why could you not add a note to someone else’s email in gmail to make it searchable. Would allow you to make gmail UI even simpler and in vein with article's claims too.
An idea I've had for a while is to store each bookmark's text content for text search, and automatically update the text once a week, and then make a p2p network for searching.
ad for a bookmark manager?<p>Does anyone have an idea about the userbase of Bookmarks? Maybe it's actually reallllllly low and this isn't worth anyone but power users' time.
I have a number of nits with this post (e.g. OP is confusing Docs and Drive), but more generally I don't get OP's point.<p>Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. Notably, the first two have no ads, so driving you to search in this case has no clear positive effect for Google.