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Blocked Sites is discontinued

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Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#131
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do love my self driving car

What's your point? It's not useful because you don't have one?

It's not useful because nobody has one. Google have yet to "do" it. Their self driving car is as useful to anyone reading this as human teleportation right now. They're great idea's but until they are accessible in some form to the public, it is still just an idea that needs work not an innovation.

I look forward to the day I can say I do have one though.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can just go to MDN once, right click on the search box, choose "Add a Keyword (...)" and then use "mdn foo" in the URL bar. Bang syntax seems such a small feature to change search engines.

How is that different from searching "mdn foo" right now?

This lets you use MDN's own search functionality, like DuckDuckGo's bang syntax.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings doorbell "Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go! If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of other search shortcuts) DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!" /me smiles eagerly

I'm using DDG, well, sometimes, and I really, really want to like it. But its reliability and performance -- just in producing search results let alone relevant ones, has been sorely lacking for the past 3-4 months.

Exactly. I am all for a competitor to google that offers some sort of useful features google doesnt, but the straight truth is that DDG does not provide as relevant of results, and you can feel how "dumb" it is compared to the results google is giving you.

It could be some sort of personal bias, but I search the same term in both engines and get (in some cases) wildly different results, rarely in favor of DDG.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#134

This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again. Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader, labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?

I'm an engineer at Google. 20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time. Effective 20% projects, in my opin…

Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard.

If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality.

It can sometimes be a challenge, but that is the fun part, not the hard part.

However this explains why Google seems so abrasive... they think it's hard!

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#135
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still see it sometimes. Meanwhile, Quora is in the works to become next EE...

I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?

They do show the first result even if you are not logged in (there is a dismissable modal popup that forces you to register though). Google indexes first result and that makes quora pages show up in relevant searches.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I had all those sites that scrape StackOverflow added to my list. I love that SO uses a CC license but it does have some unintended consequences.

Is there a public list of such site? I think I'd find it quite useful (for my own blocking).

I don't think there is. I did it on a case-by-case basis.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#137
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Jobs' advice was a mismatch for Google. Trying a million things and seeing what sticks, like an incubator, is a better idea for Google. The problem is when that turns into Microsoft-esque trend chasing. But that only happens when upper management focuses on trend chasing. Otherwise they just end up as passing experiments.

The corollary of the spaghetti strategy is that if something doesn't stick, you kill it. Taking Jobs' advice is really just setting a higher bar for sticking.

Google+ didn't stick. It's more about choosing your own priorities to focus on, and while Apple was great at that, Google made a shit decision with G+ and are sticking with it obstinately.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer at Google. 20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time. Effective 20% projects, in my opin…

Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality. It can sometimes be a challenge, but that is the fun part, not the hard part. However this explains why Google seems so abrasive... they think it's hard!

> Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. > If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality.

You're replying to jrockway. Perhaps you could curb your arrogance. Programming is indeed an extremely hard topic filled with compromises and tradeoffs that are often unattractive.

Picking the correct solution that fulfills time, effort, complexity constraints is why some people are paid so well.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#139

What disturbs me is how it's okay for Google to allow this "for Chrome users only" but it's a $700m fine for Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer into the OS. Is Microsoft really more of a monopoly than Google? Of course not. It's ridiculous that MSFT gets fined such high amounts but no one questions Google's ethics or says, "Hey, wait a minute..."

Comparisons to Microsoft aside, it's not true that no one questions Google. The EU antitrust authorities have been examining them for two years now, they just haven't reached a conclusion yet: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/22/eu-google-idUSL6N0...

Sorry - I misspoke. I meant "no one questions Google in this thread".
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