[sdevonoes]

> And they kept getting better at what made them big in the first place at least for another decade. Go back 20 years in time, and Google was a search engine. Today they are much, much more than that. Go back 25 years in time, and Amazon was a book store.

Perhaps you picked up two bad examples. Google search is worst than ever (for their users ofc, not for the ones who get money out of it). My experience as a customer in Amazon is equally bad: bad quality products (I have to spent hours filtering and double checking in order to say "yes, that's the item I want"), reviews over 4.0 that nowadays mean nothing, intrusive ads everywhere (e.g., I searched for boots in Google image search, and suddenly all the ads in other websites are about boots sold at Amazon).

I used to trust Google (I bought domains from them, used Gmail, I even bought their Nexus 5!), but not anymore precisely because how big they have became: almost-zero human customer support, they can ban you anytime they want and give you zero reasonable excuses.

[Semaphor]

> Google search is worst than ever

> My experience as a customer in Amazon is equally bad

But is that generally the case? From what I hear, non-tech people still love google (the vast, vast majority of people) and my personal experience with Amazon is pretty decent as well (though I’m not in the US, so maybe it’s not as much of an issue here) despite their search being bad.

[Ntrails]

> my personal experience with Amazon is pretty decent as well

Considering the endless dark pattern manipulation to get people signed up for Prime etc, the intolerably bad search, the hard to manage/judge "sellers", the god awful semi storefronts within a storefront from actual brands etc etc.

It is just not low hassle anymore, at every stage I'm paying extra attention lest I'm getting screwed. Turns out I'd rather go to a bookstore or a hardware store or whatever at this point. Even accounting for travel time it's lower stress.

[Semaphor]

I’ve been a prime customer ever since Prime became a thing in Germany, so I can’t talk about that. Search I already agreed (though it’s not intolerably bad, it’s barely worse than google), but the rest I have no issues with, I can see who sells what and I don’t even know where to find storefronts, all my buying is done by searching for the products or finding deeplinks.

[Retric]

I have heard non tech people starting to complain about both Google and Amazon significantly more.

[bborud]

...hence "at least for another decade" :-)