[andai]

> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality.

You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearrange the UI right before you tap the screen (after about half a second of lag), so that you accidentally click an ad. It sounds stupid but I suspect a non-trivial ratio of their revenue comes from this phenomenon.

And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.

I suspect they're taking a similar approach with Google, with the difference that you cannot pay for Google and therefore are forced to have the crap experience all of the time.

[inigyou]

I have YouTube premium and the UX issues have increased over time. Most recently the UI panel that expands into the comments section just stops responding and then you have to force close and restart the app. Another problem is that it randomly just drops your queued videos, entirely - always when you force close it, but also randomly. Sometimes random icons are invisible. After leaving a comment you sometimes can't see it.

[randallsquared]

> And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.

In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.

[andai]

My meaning was that if you pay for Google One or whatever they're calling it now, Google's UX is still ass.