You probably don't remember how the web just before Google. Just as bloated, spammy and SEO-optimized as it is today, just more primitive tech-wise. Bloat was measured in kb, but it was significant on dialup, spam was crude, but so were the blocking solutions, and SEO was hidden lists keywords, which was enough to heavily influence search results.
In fact Google did a lot against it. Google search was clean, fast, and with no ads, GMail had one of the best spam filters, and Google algorithms were highly resistant to SEO of the time. Time have passed, Google is now part of the problem, but it is not alone there, and for some time, Google really did good.
But we did get faster browsers, pretty cool browser tech. Also, Google search results have page loading speed factored in, which is also a plug for everyone.
Not sure if it's a conspiracy theory or a known thing but I read it once and it stuck in my mind that Google's projects are a form of distraction and friction to prevent people catching up with them (e.g. HTTP3).
> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby.
I'm not sure I follow: what kind of Google projects are you talking about? Google internal ones or external ones? And depending on the answer, who should get distracted by it? ... aaaand then in the end, catching up to what?
Perhaps even sooner, given the pace tech is evolving nowadays comparing to when Google took over Yahoo's place.