I thought I'd have a look around
I wanted to find out who else is doing similar stuff. While Bing comes to mind, it pissed me off with totally off topic results when I tried it, so I never went there again. So I went to the old search pastime instead: Yahoo. Remember them? Well... I typed "Chelmsford" and I got a bunch of related points of interest on the left. Clicked on one and... oh, look, a map result right on top, just like Google. Maps are provided by Nokia rather than Yahoo itself, but what's really the difference? I just wanted to make sure, so I typed "Chelmsford High Street": map as first thing. I looked for ads. "Chelmsford" displayed ads, "Chelmsford High Street" was ad-free... I wanted to see who does their ads, and my face fell off: Microsoft Advertising. Wow, Yahoo really don't do much these days, do they? So Microsoft advertise on BOTH Yahoo AND Bing. How nice of them. I then typed "1+1". Oh, look, calculator, just like Google's. Not as good as Google's though. It can't do unit conversions. I bet they don't have Easter eggs either. They don't have Docs, they don't have Drive, even their autocomplete sucks (first suggestion was what I wanted like three times, but pressing enter didn't select it, yet arrow down selects the second one, thus I have to press up again just to get my lucky result). I went to their maps. I'm centred on London, but I want directions from Chelmsford. Chelmsford, Essex, not MA. I figured I was on the global (US) site, so I switched to the UK one: autocomplete works great on the UK site as long as you want London.
I notice Yahoo has a bunch of extra services in its offer. But they're not bloody searching through them. Why? And they wonder why they're in the gutter. Google could say to the EU this: oh, hey, we'll just help Yahoo catch up, how's that? No, not Bing. They're able to take care of themselves (into the ground, we hope), but Yahoo... they could really use some help. Yahoo could have been just like Google, if they weren't a bunch of idiots.
Oh, and I went to the "shopping" section of Yahoo, searched for "16gb laptop" and the first 5 results are fucking tablets? First three results are iPads.
How can Google NOT be on top with competition like this?
Just for measure, I went to DuckDuckGo (obscure little Google wannabe I found out about on Udacity - I mean, who searches for "search engine"?) It feels like Google when it was just a little kid. It also does the calculator - with unit conversion mind you. They don't go maps or docs (who else does anyway?) And they seem to be referring a lot to third parties for their vertical search. They probably do some stuff that not even Google do, like I'm seeing in their "more goodies" page: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html - problem is nobody ever heard of them (yet).
So... what should Google do to kick the competition to get off their asses and, you know, compete? If I, who am looking for some good competition, can't really find any, what can Google do about it?