What does the world think of Google?

Sentiment on Google is sharply split between mass-market approval and vocal elite criticism. Everyday users still rate the product extremely highly, with the iOS Google app holding 4.6/5 across roughly 4.9 million ratings and reviewers calling it fast, useful and indispensable, while Mastodon and Hacker News threads praise its research output such as the open-sourced Gemma models and DeepMind's WeatherNext cyclone forecasting. Against that, the loudest and most-engaged social conversation is overwhelmingly negative: Bluesky posts with tens of thousands of likes attack AI Overviews degrading se