Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#131

Post by motters » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 1:29 PM UTC

ajays wrote: post #48

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...

I also get the impression that Google's glory days may be drawing to a close. Certainly my level of trust in their services is not what it once was.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#132

Post by rsc » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #44

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…

Your timeline here seems a bit off. Google Code Search didn't launch until mid-October 2006.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#133

Post by nene » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 1:48 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #42

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.

IMHO Github code search totally sucks. It's better than nothing, but it feels like the bare minimum - just a normal fulltext index applied to source code.

- It's not case-sensitive, which sucks for searching code.

- It's unable to search for any punctuation characters (searching for "foo()" is the same as searching for "foo"), which totally sucks for searching source code.

- The search finds lots and lots of duplicates. Even multiple matches in one file are listed as completely separate results.

- You can limit the search to one of the languages in dropdown menu, but if your language of choice doesn't happen to be in there, you're out of luck. For example you can't limit your search only to C header files.

Simply by adding package:github.com to Google Code Search search box one can apply a better tool for code in github, but unfortunately the good times seem to be over soon.

Really sad to see it go...

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#134

Post by dextorious » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 2:57 PM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #125

Joakal wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit?

Wikipedia.

Those are massively read (as opposed to write) oriented, the content is the same for everybody, and as such cachable.

Now, think something like Gmail, Basecamp, Google Docs, Facebook where that is not the case, and we're talking about an order of magnitude if not more expensive and powerful infrastructure needed.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#135

Post by 0x12 » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 3:17 PM UTC

wavephorm wrote: post #107

saurik wrote: post #44

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…

Google is like a big oil company that can afford to build a gas station right beside the mom & pop station, and undercut them until they go out of business.

And then they shut down their gas station, leaving the community stranded.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#136

Post by Donald » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 3:45 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #67

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.

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

They're just trying to redirect you to more profitable (i.e., a greater probability that you will impress an ad) search queries.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#137

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 5:37 PM UTC

rockerarj wrote: post #39

That's what I really like about Google. A company with too many products just hanging in there making losses is a company with a low morale. I think accepting the loss and shutting down low performance products is very important.

[deleted]

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#138

Post by iam » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 5:37 PM UTC

Great. Now what are we supposed to use to search code? I can't think of any alternatives.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#139

Post by pandeiro » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 7:16 PM UTC

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #58

Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study. The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]). I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in…

Off topic but in response to your conjecture about the Google Translate API:

My own is that they are protecting against the harvesting of their AI algorithm's output.

Re: Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

#140

Post by saurik » Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #130

saurik wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

"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."

I'm sorry, I must have been unclear: it has been my experience that MS /does/ pull the plug swiftly and unambiguously when they do intend to give up; they "double down or shut it down", as I tried to describe in my post. It is Google that I find tends to just give up on something, but leave it there, as if it still works, as if it will always work, and goes on to do other things while it rots.