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Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

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Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#121

Post by Joakal »

dextorious wrote: post #101
alain94040 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone can come up with a law that basically forces companies who give up on free products to open source the code they no longer use, that would lead to amazing opportunities!

It's not just the code --which might as well be useless. You also need serious $$$ in infrastructure to run it for the web masses. This is getting to be a problem for FOSS. I mean, once you could get some universities, volunteers, etc, donate some hosting for repository mirrors and stuff, and it was enough. Nowadays, a service that caters to the web crowds needs serious many to run with some capacity (and redundancy)…

Reddit?

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#123

Post by Robin_Message »

rrrazdan wrote: post #119
pdonis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who routinely uses Google with AdBlock installed, I second this. For that matter, I would gladly pay Google a monthly fee to have unlimited search, if the "free" Google only had limited search. The fact that Google has chosen to make their money from advertisers instead of users like me is not my fault.

Yes its not your fault, but it's also not Google's fault. Your sense of entitlement is very surprising.

It's not "entitlement" to ask to pay for something.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#124

Post by gnosis »

sebastianavina wrote: post #91
joebadmo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I see two viable reactions to this: 1. There's now a vacuum where Code Search was, and, evidently, some demand. Why not startup now? 2. Not even Google…

I think google code was very expensive to run because of the regular expression search feature, which was awesome, but cpu intensive... I'm sure they are killing the project because of feautres like that.

If that was the problem, they could have simply eliminated that feature and kept a simple substring search.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#125

Post by gnosis »

Joakal wrote: post #121
dextorious wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the code --which might as well be useless. You also need serious $$$ in infrastructure to run it for the web masses. This is getting to be a problem for FOSS. I mean, once you could get some universities, volunteers, etc, donate some hosting for repository mirrors and stuff, and it was enough. Nowadays, a service that caters to the web crowds needs serious many to run with some capacity (and redundancy)…

Reddit?

Wikipedia.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#126

Post by saurik »

gnosis wrote: post #125
Joakal wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit?

Wikipedia.

FWIW, Wikipedia has serious issues with backend scalability: one of the reasons why their history UI is as weird as it is, for example, is that they really really really don't want users using it, due to CPU issues in the diff algorithm (which they now have written in optimized C, and it still causes them problems).

Meanwhile, of course, they are constantly running charity drives to try to get enough money to keep the lights on. I am not certain you'd be able to do the same thing if you were running an open email service instead of managing the worlds seemingly-premier encyclopedia.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#128

Post by nl »

dustingetz wrote: post #10

buzz was awesome for link sharing via a bookmarklet to my professional audience (compare to facebook bookmarklet for life stuff). plus isn't there yet -- plus doesn't expose RSS feeds to work with my audience's existing workflows. damn. any word on a plus RSS api? i want my stream, and i want my +1 feed. i was looking into the +1 stream yesterday, seems like google made it as hard as possible to hit from javascript -…

https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list

It returns JSON (and you need to OAuth it), but it gives the stream info you are after.

https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search (with your name) is useful too.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#129

Post by ch »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #96
ch wrote: post #17

Sad to see Code Search go. I just tried a simple search for 'pthread_t' on both Koders ( http://www.koders.com ) and Krugle ( http://opensearch.krugle.org ). Both are mentioned elsewhere in the comments as possible alternatives. Krugle found no results. Koders found results, but the response time was very large. Both have a long way to go in being a viable Code Search replacement. Hopefully Code Search just gets roll…

Double quotes seem to stop it from tokenizing, e.g. "pthread_t".

Yes, but in a code search engine it would make sense to not break words that are valid symbols in more programming languages than not. It's all about sensible defaults.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#130

Post by mgkimsal »

saurik wrote: post #117
mgkimsal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation in 2007. If anyone had any doubts, Google is the new MS. In the mid 90s, any time I talked to people with ideas for new ventures, the inevitable "how will MS play in that market?" question came up, and often killed ideas before or just as they were getting started. People had seen MS buy up companies then shelve things, or enter a market (whether they should have or not) and effectively take the com…

I think it's worse with Google, honestly. It might be that I simply wasn't able to analyze Microsoft much during their heyday (generally too young), and I'm not saying it is necessarily /much/ worse, but at least in the theory of this model I'm using, it certainly seems worse; like, I blame Google more for their actions than I do for Microsoft. Microsoft wanted to win, and in so doing was brutal in their attempts to…

I think in the beginning MS wanted to win, but I think eventually they got to the point where they got in to markets just to establish some market presence, letting competitors know that they were interested in playing in that space, and preventing others from making too much headway in that space.

I don't think Google's forays in to myriad markets is necessarily motivated by any real interest in being in specific markets - I think often its a progression from their 'labs' idea. Arguably this is less aggressive than the MS of old, but... I think the effects are worse in some ways, as you see with some projects. Code Search was one. Google Voice may be another.

Loads of people end up flocking to these services to the detriment of smaller, focused competitors. In many cases, it's probably because the services are free, but also Google's "aw shucks, we're just being good guys" wins a lot of people over. Google has an insane amount of power/control over peoples' personal data and activities compared to the MS of 15 years ago, but people trust them similarly to how people viewed MS in the early 90s - Windows 3.1 was great, and Win95 took the world by storm.

The game is Google's to lose right now, and I wonder when that happens if it'll be gradual, or instant.

Good point on the Wave plug pulling. I suspect though that if they had even a fraction of the paying customers MS did for any even minor MS product, that they'd end up with a long sunset period as well. Google generally doesn't charge for many services, so I think people cut them some slack on the fast shuttering of those same services. However, it's generally the case that most people have quit using it (and, again, they're not paying anything for it anyway - here's your money back). Google killing 'Buzz' is another example of that.

What's missed in notions of 'attention economy' ('ads') is that Google monetizes our attention. When they close a service, we can't get that attention back, but they do get to keep the money they earned from our attention. In a more traditional MS-style product cancellation, there might be a chance of a refund, or we'd at least get to keep the product.

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