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Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

enterprise.google.com

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Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#141

Post by mholt »

swang wrote: post #67

this is why i'm not completely 100% with google photos. i'm ready to spend the monthly fees to store all my pictures in its original resolution, use google photos to manage/search my photos. except i don't want to commit to using it and then finding out google doesn't want to support it and just dumps it. same thing with google voice. i use it but i've never committed to using it as my main phone number. maybe it's a…

With similar concerns, I wrote photobak so I always have my photos locally: https://github.com/mholt/photobak

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#142

Post by pritambarhate »

Last couple of years or so have been an eye opener for me on how I choose libraries, tools and services for my project. One important lesson was that never choose a service which don't have plug and play open source alternative. Even hyped start ups go out of business and big companies like Facebook and Google shut down services.

Third party APIs are a even bigger risk. Facebook and Twitter APIs used to change quite often 2-3 years ago. (Haven't personally worked on this off late though.) APIs and services which seem too cheap are generally the ones which should be avoided. Because it is more likely that the companies running these will not find a sustainable business model.

Even Open Source projects get abandoned quite often. Sometimes a team puts together an impressive open source project and then they get acquired by a big company which results in abandonment of the project. I have one client who has his startup riding on Kurento Media Server for WebRTC calls. This product is in development from last one and half years. Now, after Kurento's acquisition by Twilio, Kurento's future is not clear. Also it's not a project which any body can just get into and start developing it further. Thankfully Kurento is not abandoned yet by the development team, but I had read somewhere that they are looking for new maintainers.

The lesson learned is only depend on mature open source projects and depend on PaaS services which make those open source projects available as easy to use services. Even if that PaaS service go down, there is a high chance that you will find someone who can deploy and support it for you.

However, if you are depending on a third party API or a relatively unknown Open Source Project for critical functionality, treat it as a big risk in your product's future road map and be prepared with a contingency plan.

Right now in cloud services there are way too many products which are not easily replaceable. But these are easy to use and sometimes solve really difficult problems. So the temptation to use them is too high. So they still end up in the stack, especially when the clients themselves push for these services to be used.

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#143

Post by tzakrajs »

ams6110 wrote: post #132
coldpie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?

This is the reason I pretty much stopped taking photos altogether. I realized I almost never go back and look at them.

Photos are like Steam games, maybe when you are in the hospital for a stay you can knock both out in one go, eh?

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#144

Post by bddenhartog »

threepipeproblm wrote: post #104
ancarda wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, people on HN are making decisions and building tools and startups. If everyone loses faith in Google, we'll stop using their platforms and tools which translates to loss of money. The only example I can give is at my day job, I built a backup system that uses Azure blob storage because I actually trust Microsoft more than Google. I wonder how many other people have a "anyone but Google" approach? It's not…

I already avoid new Google products because of this, as I am sure many of you do. While I've embraced Golang somewhat, it took me a few extra months of research and thought before doing that.

I can't wait for Rust to gain more traction, and be usable on the web. IMHO it's a much more pleasant language to work with.

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#145

Post by acdha »

d0vs wrote: post #93
Fej wrote: post #58

I wonder if it would be worth the money for Google to keep services like this one running, just so that people (especially enterprise customers) don't lose faith in Google's competency with regard to long-term product support. Although if you ask around here, you'd probably not find much faith for them to save.

I honestly don't think people outside the HN echo chamber care that much.

Depends on the field – e.g. in the cultural heritage space, many people used Google Reader and that still comes up any time someone mentions a Google service: “What will we do when they cancel this?” That doesn't mean that people won't use something but it definitely encourages a healthy discussion about lock-in.

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#146

Post by tokenizerrr »

i336_ wrote: post #66
tokenizerrr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing how they don't feel the need to inform non-english people.

That message is possibly in a to-be-translated queue. For something like this.... maybe not all languages, but just the ones that analytics detect significant traffic from.

I checked Dutch, German and French. Nothing.

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#147

Post by malchow »

d0vs wrote: post #93
Fej wrote: post #58

I wonder if it would be worth the money for Google to keep services like this one running, just so that people (especially enterprise customers) don't lose faith in Google's competency with regard to long-term product support. Although if you ask around here, you'd probably not find much faith for them to save.

I honestly don't think people outside the HN echo chamber care that much.

I know a lot of big company CTOs –– for old, boring companies like insurance (blah!) and real estate (yuck!) –– and they are very concerned about tech companies' willingness to keep services around for the very long haul.

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#148

Post by Eridrus »

tiatia wrote: post #121
riprowan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm right there with you. Long term Google product user here (Android, Fi, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Etc) and I'm winding it all down, except gmail which will remain my spam-mailbox.

Gmail is shit. Gmail is Email Extraordinaire but if something goes wrong and you lose access, good luck gaining it back. Try to call somebody. This, and all the privacy issues.

Account recovery is a shitshow everywhere, either it's almost useless or it's a huge vulnerability with no good middle ground I've seen.

For a moment I thought this would be a good use case for federated authentication, but who would you even trust to run that securely?

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#149

Post by xanderstrike »

nattaylor wrote: post #131
coldpie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?

This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless. In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them. To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100 albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I want a trip down memory lane, etc. A…

The value of Google's automated processing of images can't be understated. Last year I uploaded roughly 50,000 photos to Google, which was every photo I had taken since 2006. Google automatically created albums for every vacation I'd gone on in that time, plus many of the major events. Weddings, concerts, etc, were all identified.

Also the face search is probably the most brilliant piece of it. I began meticulously tagging photos in Lightroom a few years ago, and had probably 15-20% of my photos tagged with location and people in the photo. It was a pain in the ass and took forever to get to that point.

Meanwhile it took less than a week to upload everything to Google Photos, and now I can search through over 10 years of photos by person. You can also search by event, object, location, etc ("coachella," "sailboat," or "haiti" as examples).

Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018

#150

Post by arca_vorago »

I have a feeling this is geared towards pushing fortune/alexa 1000 into buying/using the google enterprise search appliance, which they charge a pretty penny for but don't allow you to see inside of (black box on the network). I was looking at one and got quoted 50k, and then when I balked and stopped communications with the sales guys they started offering price reductions... like 30k for a blackbox search appliance on my network is really something enticing!
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