"All of this is even more interesting when one considers the public testimony (accidentally shared to Google Plus) of one of Google’s own engineers, who in October 2011 revealed that Google Plus was developed not with any of the care and deliberation that Google Search was back in 1996, as a Stanford research project, but rather as a “knee-jerk reaction” to the success of Facebook. Google has been bolting on features to Plus ever since, with mixed success at best."

— Google Search Is Dead (As We Know It) | TPM Idea Lab