Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

I hope Google open source the code behind Code Search. They don't have to release all supporting libraries that are specific to Google's infrastructure though. Such that those of us who actually use the service can figure out a scaled-down implementation to serve ourselves.

I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case.

Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough to have something great occur).

I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda.

Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some twisted way about that. ;P

I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the abstract-ness was fun.)

Corporate spin-offs are very possible and are done frequently.

The problem here is that Google Code Search wasn't independently profitable, so it wouldn't make sense to sustain it as an independent company. (I presume it was created to build goodwill for Google as a whole among coders.) As to whether any of the related assets are valuable to, say, another company who thinks they can make code search profitable, I don't know. But if Google can sell those assets to such a company, it will.

It never worked all that well for me.

What I want is a "curl | grep" for the web. Just something that searches the entire page, including etc. I can do without fancy semantics.

But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me deeply.