# Google Won Search. It Also Built Glass and Stadia.
> Sixteen rankings hold Google or one of its products — search, browsers, maps, chatbots, Pixel phones, and the graveyard of things Google switched off.
*By YPB Team · Published August 9, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/google-ranked-many-ways*
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Charleston Road, Mountain View — one company, sixteen very different rankings. Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.
On 12 August 2026 Google takes a stage in New York to introduce the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold and the Pixel Watch 5.1 Hardware is the smallest thing the company does, and a launch week is a good moment to look at the rest of it.
Google Search answers most of the questions asked on the internet. Google Glass became a punchline, and Google Stadia was switched off after three years. Both of those are Google too.
Google or one of its products shows up in sixteen rankings here: browsers, maps, chatbots, smart speakers, Wi-Fi routers, and a graveyard of apps the company built and then closed.
> Google's lists split cleanly in two — the products nobody can name a rival for, and the ones Google itself switched off.
## Google vs Bing: the list where the name is the category
"Search engine" and "Google" are nearly the same word in English, which makes this ranking a strange one to vote on. Most subjects compete inside a category. This one named it.
The scale explains why. Google handled 91.31% of worldwide search in July 2026, according to StatCounter's global figures.2 Twelve other engines divide what is left over.
That share is also a legal fact. In September 2025 a US federal court barred Google from exclusive default-search deals and ordered it to share search data with qualified rivals, while rejecting the Justice Department's demand that it sell off Chrome or Android.3
Further down, the field gets more interesting. Bing sells AI answers, DuckDuckGo sells the absence of tracking, Ecosia plants trees with the ad money, and Kagi charges a subscription so there are no ads at all. AltaVista and Ask Jeeves qualify because there was a decade when each of them was the obvious answer.
Thirteen search engines, and one of them named the category. Play it →
## Chrome holds two-thirds of the web. Safari is the reply.
Chrome accounted for 68.22% of worldwide browser use in July 2026.4 It arrived in 2008, a decade after Google Search, and took the web away from a browser Microsoft had bundled with Windows.
Safari is the one rival with a comparable distribution deal: it is the default on every iPhone, iPad and Mac Apple sells. That is the whole reason the matchup is a real fight rather than a formality.
Firefox is the third case and the most awkward. It is the only browser here that keeps an independent rendering engine alive; Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc and Samsung Internet are all built on the same Chromium foundation Google maintains.
Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator earn their places the way AltaVista earned its one. Each was once simply the browser. Microsoft retired Internet Explorer in 2022.
Thirteen browsers, and nine of them run on Google's engine. Play it →
## Google vs Wikipedia: the best website ever built
This ranking asks about the whole web rather than the search box, and it sets Google beside eighteen sites that made the internet usable in completely different ways.
Google is here as a destination rather than a product. For a generation of users, google.com was the first page a browser opened and the way every other site got found.
Wikipedia is the counter-case, and a pointed one. It is a non-profit, it sells nothing, it is written by volunteers, and Google's own results page leans on it constantly for the boxed answers at the top.
Craigslist, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow and MySpace fill out the field. Each one was somebody's whole internet for a while, which is a fair definition of a great website.
Eighteen sites that made the web worth using. Play it →
## Five Google apps on one phone, all competing
Sixteen free apps make this ranking and five of them are Google's: Maps, Photos, Translate, Gmail and YouTube. No other company has more than one.
That density is the point. Google does not enter this category with a flagship; it enters with a spread, and the spread splits its own support.
Spotify, WhatsApp, Signal, Duolingo and VLC are the others worth naming here, each of them the single obvious answer inside its own niche.
Sixteen free apps, five of them from the same company. Play it →
## Google Maps vs Waze: Google competing with Google
Navigation is the category where Google's position is strongest and its problem is entirely self-inflicted. Google Maps is the default answer on most phones on earth.
Waze is the complication. Google bought it in 2013 and has run it as a separate app ever since, with its own community of drivers reporting traffic, police and potholes.
Apple Maps is the outside challenger and the one with the most improved reputation, having spent a decade recovering from a launch in 2012 that Tim Cook publicly apologised for.
Citymapper, OsmAnd and Komoot are the specialists — city transit, offline maps and hiking respectively. Each of them exists because the general-purpose app is not the best tool for one specific job.
Ten navigation apps, and Google owns two of them. Play it →
## Gmail vs Proton Mail: free and enormous against private and paid
Gmail arrived on 1 April 2004 offering a gigabyte of free storage. Rival services were then measuring inboxes in megabytes and charging to go beyond that, so the date and the number together were widely read as a prank.
Proton Mail is the reply that took two decades to form. It is Swiss, it is end-to-end encrypted, and it is built so that the company running it cannot read the messages passing through it — the opposite design principle to an inbox scanned for advertising.
Outlook is the third real contender and the quiet giant, because it is the default in most offices whether or not anybody chose it.
The rest of the field sells specificity: Fastmail sells speed, HEY screens every new sender before it reaches you, Tuta encrypts the search index, and AOL Mail is still running four decades after "you've got mail" entered the language.
Twelve inboxes, and almost nobody changes theirs twice. Play it →
## Gemini vs ChatGPT: the category Google entered second
This is the ranking where Google is not the incumbent. OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022; Google shipped Bard the following year and renamed it Gemini in 2024.
The rebrand was not cosmetic. Gemini replaced Google Assistant across Android, which folded a decade-old product into a chatbot Google had only just started shipping.
Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Grok make this the most crowded category in the article, and the only one where the field turns over every few months.
The distribution advantage is still Google's. Gemini reaches the Search results page, Gmail, Docs and every recent Android phone, which is the same lever that made Chrome the default browser.
Fourteen chatbots, and Google was late to its own category. Play it →
## The Pixel 10 Pro, three days before the Pixel 11
Ten flagship phones make this ranking, and the Pixel is the only one whose maker also writes the operating system every Android rival on the list runs.
That is Google's entire pitch in this category. The Pixel is not the fastest or the most expensive phone here; it is the one where the software arrives first and the camera processing is the selling point.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is the phone it has to beat on reputation, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra the one it has to beat on specifications.
Timing makes this section unusual: the Pixel 11 line lands on 12 August 2026, three days after this article was written, which means the entry on this list is about to be a generation old.
Ten 2026 flagships, one of them about to be replaced. Play it →
## Ten years of Pixel, and no agreement on the best one
Fifteen Google phones, no outsiders: the ranking runs from the original Pixel of October 2016 to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
The line has no single agreed peak, which is unusual for a phone series a decade old. The Pixel 3a is remembered for pricing, the Pixel 6 Pro for the first Tensor chip Google designed itself, the Pixel 9 Pro for the cameras.
The cheap models complicate it further. The a-series phones cost roughly half what the Pro models cost and lose surprisingly little, which is why a Pixel 4a can beat a Pixel 4 XL in a straight comparison.
Fifteen Pixels, ten years, no consensus. Play it →
## Nest Audio vs Amazon Echo: the room Google doesn't own
Smart speakers are the category Amazon defined. The Echo arrived in 2014 and had the living room to itself for two years before Google Home shipped.
Google's answer was to build the better assistant rather than the better speaker, on the reasoning that a device you talk to lives or dies on what it understands.
Apple took the opposite route with the HomePod, leading on sound quality and a closed ecosystem, and Sonos entered from the audio side entirely.
The result is Google's weakest strong category: real products, real reviews, and a rival whose brand name people use as the generic term for the whole shelf.
Ten speakers, and Amazon got there first. Play it →
## Nest Wifi Pro vs Netgear Orbi: the shelf nobody photographs
Thirteen routers and mesh systems make this ranking, and Google has exactly one entry among specialists who make nothing else.
The Nest Wifi Pro is designed to be left out on a shelf rather than hidden in a cupboard, which is a Google-shaped answer to a category that usually optimises for antennas.
ASUS, Netgear, TP-Link, Ubiquiti and MikroTik are the names people actually argue about here, and they compete on throughput, coverage and configurability.
Thirteen routers, one of them designed to be seen. Play it →
## Maps, Gmail, Chrome: Google against itself
This ranking removes every outside competitor. Twelve options, all of them Google products, which turns the question into a referendum on what the company is actually for.
The candidates pull in different directions. Maps rebuilt how people move through cities, Gmail changed what an inbox could hold, Chrome took the browser, Translate made a thousand signs legible, and Google Earth was the first time most people saw their own roof from space.
YouTube complicates the vote, because Google did not build it. Google bought it, and that deal gets a section of its own below.
Docs, Drive and Meet are the workplace answer, and they carry a case the consumer products cannot: for millions of people, those three are simply where the work happens.
Twelve Google products and no outsiders. Play it →
## Google buys YouTube: $1.65bn for a twenty-month-old site
On 9 October 2006 Google announced it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.5 The site had existed for about twenty months and the price was widely called reckless at the time.
Google's other entry on this list is smaller and arguably larger in consequence: it bought Android in 2005, before there was a product, and that purchase now underpins the phone business, the Play store and the default position of every Google app on non-Apple hardware.
Disney buying Pixar is the natural rival on a ranking like this. It cost more, it saved a studio, and it handed Disney the animation department that had been beating it.
Facebook buying Instagram, Microsoft buying GitHub and Apple buying NeXT fill out the top of the field. NeXT is the dark horse, because the deal brought back Steve Jobs and the operating system every Mac and iPhone still runs on.
Sixteen deals, two of them Google's. Play it →
## Google Glass vs the Galaxy Note 7: two entries on one bad list
Twenty products make the flop ranking and Google has two of them, which is more than any other company here.
Google Glass is the famous one. It shipped to developers in 2013 at $1,500, produced a word for the people who wore it, and quietly ended as an enterprise product: Google stopped selling Glass Enterprise Edition on 15 March 2023 and ended support that September.6
The Galaxy Note 7 is the comparison, and it is a different kind of failure. Samsung's 2016 flagship was recalled worldwide and permanently discontinued because its batteries caught fire, which is a manufacturing disaster rather than a misjudged idea.
Juicero, the Segway, the Virtual Boy, the Fire Phone and Windows Vista round out a ranking whose entries fail for entirely unrelated reasons. Google's second entry here gets the next section to itself.
Twenty flops, two of them from Mountain View. Play it →
## Stadia vs the Wii U: the console Google shipped and switched off
Google built a games console. Stadia launched in 2019 with no box under the television: the games ran in a Google data centre and were streamed to a phone, a laptop or a Chromecast.
The technology worked and the business did not. Google turned the servers off on 18 January 2023, and refunded games, add-ons and hardware bought through its own stores.7 Very few dead platforms give the money back.
The Wii U is the sharpest comparison here because it failed on the opposite grounds. Nintendo shipped real hardware to real living rooms and never explained why the controller had a screen in it. The console stopped at 13.6 million units, and the Switch later rescued its best games.
The Atari Jaguar, the Dreamcast, the Ouya and Sega's Saturn complete a ranking of expensive lessons about timing.
Thirteen consoles, and Google is on the list. Play it →
## Google Reader and twelve other things Google shut down
This is the final ranking here, and it contains nothing but Google products. All of them are discontinued.
Google Reader is the headline. The RSS reader was retired on 1 July 2013, with Google citing declining usage despite what it called a loyal following.8 More than a decade later it is still the first name people give when the subject comes up.
The rest is a tour through eras. Picasa organised photos before phones took over, iGoogle was a personal dashboard made of widgets, Inbox by Gmail invented snoozing and then donated its best ideas to Gmail, and Google+ was a social network the company attached to every account before closing it in 2019.
Some of these are missed for what they did and some for what they cost. Google Play Music let you upload 50,000 of your own songs for free; Google Domains was a clean, cheap registrar sold to Squarespace; Google Cloud Print made any printer reachable from anywhere. Cardboard, Hangouts, Podcasts and Stadia are here too, which means this list and the flop list share entries for entirely different reasons.
Thirteen things Google built and then switched off. Play it →
## One company, sixteen different Googles
Read the sixteen rankings in order and the same company keeps changing size. It owns the categories it named, shares the ones it entered late, and holds two seats on a list of the industry's worst products.
Nothing about that is settled, either. Both sides appealed the 2025 search ruling, and the DC Circuit is expected to hear the case in late 2026 or 2027.3
Each of the sixteen gets settled by [a run of straight two-way choices](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison) rather than a score out of ten. A company this large can lead one of those orders and trail the next.
Think there's a Google product missing from the graveyard, or a browser that deserves better? Open any of the sixteen and put it in order yourself.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Apple vs Samsung: 14 Categories, 14 Arguments](/articles/apple-vs-samsung-ranked) — the two phone makers Google keeps meeting
- [PlayStation vs Xbox vs Nintendo, Ranked Side by Side](/articles/playstation-vs-xbox-vs-nintendo-ranked) — the console war Stadia tried to join
- [Where Does YouTube Actually Rank?](/articles/where-does-youtube-rank) — the acquisition, judged on its own terms
Sources
9to5Google — Made by Google 2026 event date and expected devices: 9to5google.com (checked 2026-08-09)
StatCounter Global Stats — worldwide search engine market share, July 2026: gs.statcounter.com (checked 2026-08-09)
CCIA — the September 2025 remedies decision in the DOJ search case, including the rejected Chrome and Android divestiture and the subsequent appeals: ccianet.org (checked 2026-08-09)
StatCounter Global Stats — worldwide browser market share, July 2026: gs.statcounter.com (checked 2026-08-09)
Google press release filed with the SEC — "Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock", 9 October 2006: sec.gov (checked 2026-08-09)
Google for Developers — Glass Enterprise Edition sales ended 15 March 2023, support ended 15 September 2023: developers.google.com (checked 2026-08-09)
Stadia Help (official) — shutdown on 18 January 2023 and the refund programme: support.google.com (checked 2026-08-09)
The Keyword, Google's official blog — "A second spring of cleaning", retiring Google Reader on 1 July 2013: blog.google (checked 2026-08-09)
