Ever since I realized that the Google’s ‘cached’ pages in search results were essentially a user-browsable backup of the Internet, I’ve been very impressed with them, and willing to allow them a lot of wiggle room. This wiggle room extends to a virtual blindness of their faults, most notably their campaign to gather and mine all the world’s electronic data. I understand that the payment for having Google spend the time and money to hire very smart people to organize, correlate and present all that data is to give them free reign to mine the data for patterns and trends to sell to their advertisers. Much like the news media of yesteryear, Google lives off the payments of advertisers, and that funding is how they are able to innovate on new products.

Looking back, part of what made them so great in the arena of search was that their search didn’t feel cluttered. Unlike Yahoo!’s main page, Google’s search page wasn’t crammed with useless bits of trivia, news, and advertisers. Search results were relevant, and the ads were displayed in a non-obtrusive manner. Their presence online projected the sense that they really and truly got it – they were able to make a product that was so far and above their competitors that we went from using a dozen search engines to only using two.

Gmail was another outstanding success story. Before Gmail, webmail was a horrible way to use email – the interface was lousy, the SPAM filtering was useless, and the quotas were anemic. People used it, though, because it was everywhere they went. Gmail brought features, such as keyboard shortcuts and useable SPAM filtering that was more than simple blacklists/whitelists. They added onto Gmail with Gtalk – a jabber client/server that finally brought an open chat protocol to the masses. Webmail changed from being what you had to use if you didn’t have email provided by work or school to being what everyone used.

Recently though, things have been less rosy. There was the kerfuffle recently about Google user-testing 41 shades of the color blue instead of using and trusting designers to do their job. Google Latitude, released recently for the iPhone, is pretty much useless (though this may be due to AT&T, not Google). Orkut, Google’s social networking site, is little used outside Brazil and India. Even miniMSFT, who is usually somewhat envious of the Google machine, thinks that Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS and other recent products is akin to Microsoft in the bad days.

In short, it looks like Google has gotten big enough that it can afford to fail at times. It also has enough market penetration to allow it to do the classic Microsoft move of “build it now, and we can ride out the competition from our insane profits” mentality. I don’t like it. It’s not the Google we know and love.