I am still super unhappy about Google removing the "Discussions" filter as a search option over a year later. It was insanely useful. I think you can still do it by adding something to the URL, but the quality of the search filter has dropped drastically (which is maybe why they removed it). I don't know of any other search engines that have a Discussions filter.
Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
101–110 of 157 posts
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#102Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do. Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.
Google Wave was a collaborative editor. It was nothing like Slack or HipChat (unless I've managed to really misunderstand Slack despite building a few things on top of it). It's problem was that it didn't have a purpose - no one really knew what to do with it because a "Wave" was presented an amorphous blob of "knowledge" that people could contribute to at the same time. It was an online notepad, sketchbook, and spre…
You can do collaborative editing in Google Docs. What was the difference between Google Docs and Google Wave?
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#103Wow, I've forgotten how many Google products I used that were abandoned at some point. I counted 15 that I've used. To be fair, some of these didn't die - they were renamed, graduated, or folded into another project. Google Talk actually still works on Google Chat if you have the old client. Google Listen became Google Music, Checkout was mostly folded into Wallet, etc. Sidenote: if you are the developer, that yellow…
Google Listen didn't become Google (Play) Music, it was completely abandoned. There is no support for podcasts within the GPM app or website.
Google has actually moved away from supporting podcasts without 3rd party software, whereas Apple introduced a dedicated app with iOS 6.
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#104I've had this persistent nagging feeling that I shouldn't use Google Keep for anything important because it could be gone tomorrow.
I've found need for a note taking mobile app recently, but after trying to use Keep and seeing that it has zero organizational tools such as tags or folders, I just started to use Evernote instead.
Frankly, it is nearly impossible to recommend Keep when Evernote exists. Until they have, at minimum, some way to organize notes, it's just a pile of notes sitting in one window. But it would still be a hard sell when compared to all the Evernote features, such as the desktop clients that allow you to take screenshots and annotate them.
Edit: Oh, and there's also Geeknote¹ for CLI usage, as well as Vim plugins².
¹ http://www.geeknote.me/ ² https://github.com/neilagabriel/vim-geeknote
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#105I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects. Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul. There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them. Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the…
To add one more: Writely became Google Docs -- anything but a failure.
Hm yet its leaky, buggy and low-feature. Useful for casual use but nowhere near professional. When will they drop it, or break it? Like some gmail features got broken this week.
Lesson: don't hang anything important on Google apps.
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#106RIP Google Code Search, aka the best code search ever. No credible competitor has yet emerged, and this is a real loss for all programmers: no more easy searching for sample code in obscure WIN32 Api, easy searching for arch-specific POSIX implementation details used by various open source projects, global error message grepping, and countless other little things which are not incredibly painful and difficult. I am s…
You don't think github is all that and more?
We use github enterprise and I've only heard complaints about its search capabilities.
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#107Sparrow was a sad one.
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#108Coming soon: Google+
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#109RIP Google Code Search, aka the best code search ever. No credible competitor has yet emerged, and this is a real loss for all programmers: no more easy searching for sample code in obscure WIN32 Api, easy searching for arch-specific POSIX implementation details used by various open source projects, global error message grepping, and countless other little things which are not incredibly painful and difficult. I am s…
You don't think github is all that and more?
Github is a great alternative for Google Code.
Nothing currently out there is as good as Google Code Search was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search
Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google
#110I was one of the (apparently few) people who used Google Sets a lot. Even though its results were often hit-or-miss, there were enough hits for it to be a valuable resource. And unfortunately, I don't know of any comparable alternative. (But please tell me if you do!) Here is the problem it solved: It let you discover members of a set by entering a few members that you already know. For instance, if you enter "terrie…
What were some real-world situations where you used Google Sets? It always seemed to me like a cool toy without much practical use, and certainly not the most worthy sink of a good engineer's limited time.
Oh, was that E_NOTIMPL, E_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, E_NOIMPL...? I forgot again. Google sets to the rescue! S_OK, E_FAIL, submit. I did that particular one at least 20 times.
I worry that a truly great technology has died with Sets: the way it would correctly intuit the scope of your set. Give it cities in Ohio, it spits out other Ohio cities. But give it London and Tokyo and you get all the major metropolises across the globe. Kudos to those who made it, and I hope they can do it again when applications for it arise.