Aprils fool 2 years in advance.
Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
171–180 of 191 posts
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google are only interested in selling things by the billion or billion, therefore things like the robots have to go. This is one of those products that does not sell to millions and therefore it has to be got rid of. Not sure when the 'must sell billions' idea came along, it was before the Pixel phone but is a relatively new idea for Google.
It's sort of the startup philosophy in reverse. "Only do things that have economies of scale." As if Google is just one person controlling a billion robots, and can do anything a billion robots can do, but can't do anything that requires more than the oversight of a single human for the entire project. (In est, Google is the player-character in Factorio.)
This is an argument for automating top management. There are companies that choke on limited CEO bandwidth, and Google seems to be one of them. Apple under Jobs kept the product line so small that one person could manage it, which is one way to do it. Google, though, keeps trying to broaden their revenue stream beyond ads, without much success.
This is a classic management problem. The first person to really get a handle on it was Alfred P. Sloane, who headed GM and wrote "The Concept of the Corporation". He figured out how to organize a very large company effectively, and GM's management structure worked well for half a century. They beat out everybody else until Japanese competition appeared. (GM probably stayed with Sloan's structure too long, but nobody else really knew what to do.)
There's the argument that, rather than one company having a broad range of products, there should be many companies, each with a narrow product range. It's cheaper to run a fund than manage a conglomerate. The conglomerate concept was that "synergy" between the business units would reduce cost. In practice, this rarely works.
There are some successful companies with very broad product lines. Mitsubishi and Samsung are two of the biggest. General Electric was the classic US example, but they've backed off from most of their consumer products other than major appliances.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#173I've always wondered why Google doesn't just slowly raise the prices on things like this until either everyone switches due to attrition and they can shut it down noiselessly, or it becomes profitable.
There's been a few services (Google Reader and CodeSearch) that I would have paid a couple bucks a month for.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This page is actually strangely appealing. It loads fast. I don't have to click off to another page to get the news headlines. Ads are restrained to just a couple square boxes.
It may be a couple of boxes but that link spam is something else, thought I was a domain parked page for a second there.
But that like half a page of link spam loads faster than a single banner ad on most sites.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#175Earlier 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…
If Google isn't careful, Microsoft is going to cannibalize their enterprise space. I think Microsoft has been getting the same vibes and it really seems like they are finally trying to be team players and not just catering to the low-hanging fruit of non-tech savvy folk. I wouldn't be surprised if they take the gamble on releasing a (free?) online enterprise office application suite as some sort of MS Office Lite. Go…
Microsoft already has released Office Online. It's lite versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They're quite good. They get certain enhancements when you buy an Office 365 subscription (in addition to the full applications).
IMHO there's nothing wrong with wanting to work for Google/Facebook/any of the big 4/5. Get one of those on your resume and you are set for life, even if the work isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#176I 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.
Their search appliance (GSA) is being replaced with a cloud search product. I would guess once that is released it will make the GSS product a bit redundant, so it makes sense to discontinue, the timing is a bit strange though...
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#177I 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…
Unlikely, the GSA product is also discontinued. This is a push to a google cloud alternative i would guess.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a couple orders of magnitude more users, yes. Willing to pay $100/year to remove branding on a search engine you add to your website is far, far less common than "willing to pay to listen to music".
Plenty of small businesses spring for gmail and Google Apps for Business
Which are also a couple orders of magnitude fewer in number than music-listeners.
Nonzero to be sure, but nothing like the numbers they're used to in free, ad-supported products.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Google isn't careful, Microsoft is going to cannibalize their enterprise space. I think Microsoft has been getting the same vibes and it really seems like they are finally trying to be team players and not just catering to the low-hanging fruit of non-tech savvy folk. I wouldn't be surprised if they take the gamble on releasing a (free?) online enterprise office application suite as some sort of MS Office Lite. Go…
Microsoft already has released Office Online. It's lite versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They're quite good. They get certain enhancements when you buy an Office 365 subscription (in addition to the full applications). IMHO there's nothing wrong with wanting to work for Google/Facebook/any of the big 4/5. Get one of those on your resume and you are set for life, even if the work isn't all it's cracked up to b…
I didn't know about Office Online. Glad to hear Microsoft is doing that.
The problem with Google and Facebook is that I've come to realize our ethics are extremely misaligned.
I'm not interested in building exploitable systems filled with damaging metadata that can be abused by totalitarian states or vengeful employees.
I'm not interested in forcing Africa into a world where Facebook and Google are synonymous with the internet.
I'm not interested in running an echo chamber that 1/4 of the world's population uses, subjecting others to political influence and carefully syndicated information that influences their thoughts and behavior, while providing massive quantities of foreign user data to three-letter agencies interested in squashing social uprisings in third-world countries.
And I'm not interested in shutting down my moral compass by accepting corporate propaganda that tells me what I am doing is right and for the benefit of mankind.
Only reason I ever wanted to work for either was the prestige, the badass lunch buffets, and the feeling that I'm doing something important, positive and ground-breaking. But those are all selfish desires and the last one isn't true.
Re: Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
#180Any site can free themselves from the Borg: https://duckduckgo.com/search_box