Search helps people find information.
YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created.
Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
I didn't say they were better. Just that without Google Translate, I doubt you would have had a much harder time in your recent trip to Japan because you could have used them, and they aren't particularly worse :-).
It's not just about whether you yourself use Google Translate, it's that - much more than anywhere else I've ever travelled - Japanese people will regularly use Google Translate to communicate with you, usually by typing or speaking into their tablet and then showing you the machine translation.
They are actively enshittifying search and YouTube. So if these things are good for society, and Google is making them worse , it feels like we shouldn't be giving them too much credit.
Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).