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Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

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Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#41

Post by joebadmo »

frossie wrote: post #20
joebadmo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one of the things Larry Page talked about in the earnings call yesterday was aggressive project pruning and focus. I agree that this is a good sign of Page's leadership.

The danger lies in being a company with a reputation of launching stuff and then not sticking with them. At some point that starts harming adoption levels of new products. Edit to comment below: "Trying and failing is a far better outcome than never having tried at all" is a great mantra for individuals or even small startups, but I am not sure how it applies here. I am still bitter over Google abandoning Notebook (w…

I would definitely not base any sort of important business function on any free Google beta product without seriously considering the difficulty of migrating upon shutdown of said service.

I assume that a major criterion for Google shutting down a service is low usage. For them, that constitutes failure. Very few people were using Notebook, Calendar Search, Wave, or Code Search. I'm sure it's fairly simple to calculate the cost benefit of devoting even minimal resources to a product that 1. doesn't make money; and 2. doesn't substantially make the web better for some minimum threshold of people.

Google is one of the richest companies in the world and could afford a lot of things, but that's not justification that it should.

You're right that there's an interesting tension between starting/failing fast and getting people to trust that a product will stick around. But I don't actually think that's a big part of the calculation for most people. When Google releases a new product, I usually go either "Ooh, that sounds awesome, I'm signing up for the beta immediately," or "Not interested, moving on." I rarely go "I'm not going to use this because it probably won't get enough users to last."

I'm glad to hear that going with startup technologies is going well for you, but the danger seems just as big. Startups fail all the time, and you have no recourse afterward.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#42

Post by simonw »

kpozin wrote: post #4

This is awful. Code Search is an indispensable tool for finding reference code and real-world uses of various libraries. I don't know of anything on par with it.

GitHub search is pretty good - it only searches code that's been hosted (or mirrored) on GitHub, but that's a LOT of code.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#43

Post by joeyespo »

CJefferson wrote: post #5

I'm very disappointed to see google code search go. It was very useful (for me at least, don't read this as a comment on the whole committee / process) in finishing the new C++ standard, and answering the question "Well, did anyone ever really write code like X?" (the answer was usually yes). Buzz makes a lot of sense, although I imagine some users will be disappointed it couldn't be more 'cleanly' imported into goog…

Too bad Google can't do the opposite of acquiring a company for things like this. Google Code was incredibly useful, it'll be sad to see it go.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#44

Post by saurik »

So, in 2005 I was involved in a company that thought "man, it would be great to build a search engine for source code". I even started putting together components for it, such as a model for finding text inside of larger documents that had statistical properties similar to code, auto-detecting the language, so you could find code snippets inside of blog posts.

However, by the time we got organized enough to actually do it, Google Code launched, and had this really awesome code searching feature, that everyone considered to be "more than good enough" and "comprehensive, as Google is indexing the hell out of stuff like this".

But, now, Google has now determined that that wasn't sustainable, and has shut down the project. Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code.

This... (I now emphatically point at the previous paragraphs) is why I don't like Google very much: they have such large resources available to them that they tend to just swoop in and offer an unsustainable service at a loss, training users that "things should be so free it hurts: in fact, they must be losing money on every use of this" (Google Voice being a great example), thereby stifling innovation by people who can't possibly undercut that.

Note: this isn't even a problem specific to Google... startup companies that get VC money tend to also cause this problem. They get tons of money, offer a service at a heavy loss while they use that burn time to determine a business model, actively knowing that they are operating at a loss in order to get users as fast as possible from other people who might try to get them.

Of course, the result is that the company usually either totally implodes (typical of any startup) or, even more insidiously (for the projects that actually becoming successful, even quite popular / common), come up with a business model so ludicrous that the users actively revolt against the entire concept of the service...

... and, where do they go? To some other free service offered by another company that managed to get equally large sums of VC money because they point at that other company that had hundreds of millions of users that just failed because of a bad business model, something they will know how to fix (in a couple years or so, once they get around to figuring that part out...).

:( I liked Google Code search, and I'm going to miss it.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#45

Post by heydenberk »

I liked Buzz's idea of integrating a social inbox with the an email inbox, and in particular I liked Reader integration with Buzz. If Google doesn't integrate Reader and Gmail with Plus more effectively, I'll be spending _less_ time being social with Google than before.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#46

Post by bartl »

jjwiseman wrote: post #29
chaosmachine wrote: post #24

Google Code Search has been pretty broken (for my use case, anyway) for a while. I build Drupal Code Search[1] on top of their API back in 2008, and a few months later, they stopped indexing code from Drupal.org. Since then, 2 new versions of Drupal (6 and 7) have been released, and none of the new code has been indexed, making my site largely useless except for legacy code searches. I guess I will just shut it down…

Was it broken in some way other than it didn't index drupal.org?

Drupal.org most likely was not the only site they no longer indexed. Probably no code site was still being indexed, at all.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#47

Post by tlogan »

joebadmo wrote: post #18
spiffistan wrote: post #9

There's a competitor to google code search at least: http://www.koders.com/ Actually, I'm kinda glad they're phasing stuff out. It shows courage to do that, a lesson probably hard learned at google. They have a myriad of products, but would probably do much better with them if they thoroughly finished them before release.

Yes, one of the things Larry Page talked about in the earnings call yesterday was aggressive project pruning and focus. I agree that this is a good sign of Page's leadership.

I agree with you to the extend: some products needs to be cut.

However, the problem is that Google is synonym for search and getting out search business even for niche is a very dangerous move. That allows small companies to attack them from low-end and then slowly growing (from code-search, they add bug search, then add stack-overflow search, then social search, ...) and eventually they can become a Google replacement.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#48

Post by ajays »

I may be biased, but: I feel like Google's "geek cred" is slipping. It feels like PMs (and their "monetization strategies") are gaining control over at El Goog, shutting down anything that isn't "revenue positive".

You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search.

So the slow slide of Google turning into "just another tech company" starts...

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#49

Post by heydenberk »

Also: there will always be people decrying Google's tendency to launch and phase out new products and there will always be people decrying its reticence to try new things even if they fail, and they're probably doing a good job if they're attracting roughly equal amounts of these responses.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#50

Post by jsnell »

anon1385 wrote: post #37
zackb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they give a reason for shutting down code search? I didn't see it but think it deserves some kind of explanation of the decision.

It costs money. The kind of people who use it probably have adblock installed. It's not surprising that they would cancel it, they are a company driven by profit after all. I don't think there is really much to explain. Maybe once it had utility as a way to earn good will among developers, but presumably they don't care too much about that these days, given how little competition and how much brand recognition they h…

It might not be simply a matter of money, there are other limited resources. For example there could be trouble staffing the project due to nobody wanting to work on it. Or be unwilling to staff it since they feel that anyone working on it could make a bigger impact elsewhere.

(And before anyone starts nitpicking that either of those issues could be solved by just throwing more money at it, money and people aren't actually infinitely fungible).

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