Probably, but this leads down the rabbit hole on "what counts as discontinued". There's probably plenty that got killed internally before seeing a public user. Some on the Wikipedia list were more like features within a product (e.g. Latitude), some of them just morphed into products directly (e.g. real-time search, I think), and some of them were not really in a 'launched' state (e.g. Image Swirl).
I agree with you, and in my opinion Reader was the most used and most useful product on that list. Most other discontinued products were indeed underutilized (for various reasons) or outpaced by their competitors. But TBH, there are some products I wouldn't mind seeing on that list (Allo being one of them).
If you liked Google Reader, please give Inoreader a try. It's a nearly perfect clone but with useful features like filtering and following Twitter feeds.
> Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.
It's not that I hate Allo, I just prefer Hangouts. That might seem orthogonal, but a part of me worries that at some point in the future Hangouts will be deprecated in favor of Allo.
Allo is in maintenance mode. The entire Allo team has been moved over to Android Messages. Hangouts is also in maintenance mode. The 'Hangouts' branding has been repositioned to their slack-type productivity tool. Like Allo, what you know as Hangouts is dead.
I agree with you. This list actually had the opposite intended effect on me.
Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes.
Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"
So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.
> Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"
Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.
Google Video was also better technically in basically every way— the audio/video sync was better (I preferred it for posting short swing dancing clips), encoding was faster, and seeking and mid-video permalinks were better. Plus, I believe GV had a live streaming feature first.
YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).
That's interesting. It never occurred to me whether they were technically better. I always preferred YouTube to Google Video, just from the perspective of someone watching videos - because of the UI/UX of the site and player (didn't use any of the social features).
YouTube both won and lost, because it was a startup operating in the legal grey zone. It was long before most content was commercial content, commercials, music videos or other professional content most often clips or full videos of content people did not own copyright for. Sure, many people want to share their amateur content on the island with the most inhabitants. Neither Google other rivals or other startups had the gumption and survivor instinct to play this hand. If Google was the host or already owned YouTube when the DRM issues emerged and were being negotiated the copyright owners would have come after Google even harder, faster and more expensively. I say YouTube lost, because they needed to sell. When Google bought YouTube the business model and risks were better known. Months after Google purchased YouTube Viacom famously sued. By that point publishers were seeing benefits along with the costs.
Why was it "their lunch" ? Back then, Google was a search company which made forays into mail and maps. Android or Chrome hadn't been released yet (and by 2005 probably barely started).
Video hosting is a substantially different product. I don't see why Google should have owned it more than any other web company at the time, including YouTube itself.
Google already owned Blogger at that time, and I think with some hindsight you can say they always had a half-hearted interest in things "social". YouTube has a large social component of course. That is obvious now, but you could have easily imagined something less social back then.
The Blogger acquisition and integration for me is a puzzle wrapped into an enigma. They paid good money for it, then froze it. They weight blogs hosted there very favourably in Search, but there is no push to get users and it emanates an aura of “this product might actually be a walking zombie”. If they don’t value the product, why don’t they push people away? If they value Blogger, why is it so frozen?
This is common theme of Evan Williams startups. He starts a company to build new blogging platform because last one sucked. Enormous amount of head spinning marketing is done to acquire millions of bloggers. Then the company is sold to suckers for few billion dollars. Most talent leaves and the sucker aquirer freezes the product in zombie state. Ev Williams then starts another blog startup because his last one sucked. Next up: Medium.com.
Is there a single, major US tech company that hasn’t collaborated with the military?
The whole military runs on Windows, Exchange, Office. AWS runs major data centers for them. RedHat, IBM, Intel ... who hasn’t done work for the military or intelligence apparatus?
I think back then they had a very good chance to outgrow facebook and lead the "open web" forward. Instead they went all in with G+ and its early variants.
Now they have to work with facebook to index its content.
Eh a dying whale is still dying. Google missed the cloud and is next in line for the privacy burner (see Facebook) they arent even in the top 3 by market value anymore.
Sure, but please note that it is not "smart" related.
All i wanted to say is that dying is not related to market value.
Die as in bankrupt or not profitable is a big stretch for its use as a metaphor. Im not sure how to put this without sounding patronizing and/or stupid and/or explaining to retards but:
There are more things in life besides money or economical viability.
One could argue that afk it is way more easy to use it metaphorically to stereotype those that have money than those who do not.
IBM earned $13 billion in operating income over the prior four quarters, making them one of the most profitable companies on earth. They're not even remotely close to being at risk of actually dying.
They're comparable in profit to Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent.
GM and Micron have ridiculously low PE ratios. That also says nothing about whether their businesses are at risk of dying.
I don't think this list is complete. Inbox is not here, and neither are the multitude of Android apps that Google kept rolling out and discontinuing (e.g. Allo).
I think it’s the UI mostly. It’s nice having all your messages categorized in bundles, grouped chronologically, then sorted by priority. With Inbox I find that I skim through way less crap to find emails that need attention.
The interface on Inbox is _much_ less cluttered. I spent an hour turning off things in gmail trying to clean it up after the announcement, and it still looks too busy.
Other specific features are missing that help with email fatigue. As far as I know, there's no way for me to tell gmail to group a set of emails together and only alert / show them to me once per day at a certain time, like you can with Inbox. I can't create custom bundles to hide large groups of emails I don't want to accidentally bury other content (without actually removing them from the inbox). Gmail kind of has the "tabbed inbox", but you can't configure the categories with the flexibility that bundles had. In Inbox, I feel like I can control how much email interrupts me without also missing anything important. I don't get this same feeling with gmail.
The Inbox product as a whole had a strong focus on trying to reduce the interruption of your email and keep your inbox clean. While gmail has taken in some of the features, it hasn't absorbed the core goal of the project.
Although, by that logic G+ shouldn't be on the list either. To be clear, I agree that project that are still sunsetting but not dead should probably not be there until they are fully down, just pointing out the inconsistency.
https://killedbygoogle.com <- I got pissed after the Inbox announcement and turned it into a Hacktoberfest project. Going to prune it over the weekend to remove some of the cruft (specific phone models with clear lifecycles, etc).
It’s defineatly not comprehensive. When PNaCL was first announced I thought the idea was interesting but Google didn’t really do anything with it and now web assembly is the thing.
The irony for me is that if a company wanted to construct a strong profile of me to sell me ads, I'd have to imagine that Feedly (I switched to Feedly when Google Reader was retired) would now be one of the best placed to do that. I spend far more of my personal time there than in any other app.
This is a popular meme for some reason, but "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right - speak up!" is literally the last line in the code of conduct.
Indeed. I often think there's a lot of confirmation bias in the 'google kills products' complaints... Certainly many many small to medium sized, user-facing start ups have died in the same time, but we don't hear the same sort of FUD about using start up tech.
Google Reader is sadly missed but a few worthy alternatives cropped up. What this clubbing of Reader taught many people is that out with a few select services (GMail and Search), everything else will be clobbered eventually so don't rely on Google tools in the long term.
Not only that, but even then, half of these are super obscure projects even people in Hackernews, which are generally more tech knowledgeable, have never heard of.
Who here knows what Dodgeball, Jaiku, Sidewiki or Fast Flip were?
Hell, to be honest, even within the valley, I often meet people that don't even know what more "popular" products like Wave or iGoogle were.
Normally companies retire products because they are lightly used or have fallen far behind competition. Google kills stuff on whims. Google Reader, url shortner, code search, Picasa - all these are terrible examples of things that got shutdown.
All these has real consequences. Other day I was looking to buy a movie and it was available on Amazon as well as YouTube, I went to Amazon because YouTube feels much more likely to shutdown it’s movie business on a whim while Amazon will likely fight out to last moment. Same goes for buying music.
The list is also a little unfair. Latitude didn't die, it's just a renamed and built into Google Maps. Picasa is also questionable. Google Photos does more and I end up using it more than I used Picasa. Google Talk. I guess I don't know what was lost. A chat box still appears in Gmail. Google Video seems replaced by youtube and google drive. Google Gears was subsumed into web standards.
In other words the list is padded IMO. Services that actually shut down like Wave for Google+ or Reader are in a different category than services who just became part of some other product.
Microsoft has also discontinued a lot of programs over its life, but there's one major difference---I can still use those Microsoft programs! Microsoft long ago stopped supporting MS-DOS 2.1 but I can still use it. Heck, I even have a verion of PC-DOS 1.0 around here somewhere.
But the discontinuations at Google? Gone gone gone. I can't even keep a copy around for my own use. That's one reason why I dislike web applications.
Remember Google Code Search? That was a great feature of Google search. You could search for swear words in all the code available worldwide. In one (Sun Microsystems?) code there was a comment "The user is a wanker. He cannot remember his password." The old days were much more fun.
Yes, google code search was a great service. One could use regular expressions and limit the search to particular language or license. Moreover it indexed code from any tarball or repository google bot run into, so the sheer size of data one was searching was hard for others to match.
It will only occur if everything is so irrevocably on fire that you need to debug a lot of code anyway, at which point the error message is useless.
Specifically, the branch is only reachable if the PID is not what was expected, or the location that the macro was supposed to longjmp to is not set, which would be fatal defects.
Try the search feature in many CMS systems. Those tend to really suck, with WordPress' being awkward enough that a whole ecosystem of plugins cropped up to replace it.
There's also at least one version of the OpenCart admin search which was designed so poorly that it didn't actually search based on whether the term was anywhere in the page title/content, but whether the title started with the search term (I think they'd screwed up the MySQL syntax). That was interesting.
Either way, search on a system not designed as a search engine is usually okay at best, absolutely terrible at worst.
GitHub is most aweful search that I have regularly used. It doesn’t even have basic dedup capability, forget about any thing slightly less basic like limiting search to file names. And it’s not that it is hard to derank potential dedups given that they already know the fork graphs. I have spent good chunk of my productivity manually sweeping through pages upon pages of exact same search results to find the snippets I was looking for and hating creator(s) of this functionality from the bottom of my heart. These people shouldn’t be allowed to build any search again without a mandatory year long rehabilitation training camp (unless they are doing this for enemy states during war times).
How about finding multiple hits per file? Tell me how many matches there are in each file, PLEASE. I should not have to click into the match to know there's more than one match in that file. I shouls also be able to have a view that shows me every match (a la grep/ag). If I need to search, I pull down the repo, index it quickly with ag and do the search. That's really unacceptable, in my eyes, when the basic search is there already.
I wonder if the writer of that comment was American or British - it appears that the term is somewhat less offensive in the US.
Once, whilst watching a relatively mainstream US series I was surprised to see a character refer to their colleagues as "wankers", which seemed rather incongruous.
it appears that the term is somewhat less offensive in the US.
A lot of ordinary British things are seen in the U.S. through a filter of... let's call it "quaintness."
Swear words. Thatched roofs. Music on AM radio.
So, yeah. Whatever offensive word you heard probably didn't have the same impact on the other side of the Atlantic. There's probably some reciprocity, too.
My experience is that this doesn’t apply to the see you next Tuesday word, at least here in Canada. It’s seen as very offensive according to the Canadians I know. Speaking as a Brit, that word is thrown around quite casually in the UK!
Google still uses code search widely internally. It's one of their greatest internal-only productivity boosts. The fact it has knowledge of includes and cross-references and function prototypes and templates is amazing...
You can still use it as an outsider to search Chromium:
Considering that one can't 'index by regex', I wonder how the backend works - does it actually run the regex against every source code line in the repository in a few hundred milliseconds? Sounds expensive! They must have thousands of machines! Maybe thats why they don't have a public codesearch tool for the whole internet...
If this is your site; the reasons only come up when clicking the rather small images, though it looks like clicking anywhere in the “cards” should do this. (On mobile).
Really amazing how many products were merged into Google+ and superceded. And then also how many products were sunsetted in favor of putting more development time into Google+.
And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google properties.
Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH move.
Neat! Maybe you could add a line or two to describe what each product was? For example I'd never heard about Sidewiki, Google Jaiku or Google Catalogs. It seems fitting that a tombstone would mention not just the date of death but also a bit about who they were and what they did.
This list annoys me. Reading it, some of those still exist, many we're just folded into other services, and a couple appear to have been 20% projects that were never Google's to kill.
It's worth noting that even as someone who frequents tech and hackernews frequently, I still didn't know what half the stuff on there was. Things like Dodgeball, Jaiku, Gears, Fast Flip, Urchin or Aardvark. Never even heard these names before.
What annoys me the most is that they have the right ideas (Waves, Helpouts), but they lack conviction.
The most ridicoulous example is when they introduced wireless charging, then removed it, and then added it back when Apple finally added it themselves.
They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for their money.
Gmail: at its peak it had 1.2 billion users. The product management team was replaced with [people who unfortunately are not qualified to hold their position.] (I imagine), and they thought it's a good idea to replace the desktop version with an unusable one that took literally 15 seconds to 1 minute to open, would not load completely, hung on searches for mail, reported actions as finished that did not make it across the network, and was slow as unusable. Later the team thought it was a good idea to simply blindly cc people on mail who it thought might be interested in seeing mail you're sending (previously only a suggestion, which was fine), such as cc-ing your boss when you send your resume/CV somewhere (since you cc your boss on lots of things) while hiding the fact that it was doing so, not reporting the mail as sent while actually sending it, and other shenanigans. It also thought security wasn't important anymore and would link accounts that had nothing to do with each other, so that you could just access anyone's inbox. it would replace some text you sent with different text based on machine learning. just an all around shambles. after people realized that they werne't getting what they signed up for, they started looking at different providers for the first time in 15 years. R.I.P. Gmail. The service was finally shuttered in 2020 after an exodus of nearly 90% of its users.
just kidding. Hey Google: [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right?
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EDIT: this was flagged while going up and down and up and down in points. I've now replaced the parts in brackets with neutral language, previously it was expressed strongly and colloquially.
>The product management team was replaced with people [who unfortunately are not qualified to hold their position.] (I imagine)
I also wrote the solution:
>Hey Google: : [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right?
It's rare that a fix like this is so easy and decisive. So easy. I'm absolutely serious.
-
I've edited the comment for more neutral language (previously it was colloquial.)
Someone here on HN commented that the new Gmail is using some deprecated API that was not implemented in FF and is polyfilled there, which makes the interface very slow.
It also was mentioned that they are working on a refactoring, but alas, it's painful for me too.
We are the goog, lower your firewalls and surrender your tech. We will add your data and project uniqueness to our own. Your projects will dissolve to service our bottom line. Resistance is futile.
I don't personally agree with your statement and this is not one of my gripes. I've never had any problem with Google's approach to data collection and usage in gmail or, indeed, any product. Believe me, you can tell from the tone of my top reply that I would tell you if I did. I really don't hold back. Not an issue for me.
I'm totally behind everything Google has done on this front since 1999-2018 and for the foreseeable future. Zero issue. They have earned my trust and maintain it. (serious comment)
Slightly (un)related, at Google X they seem to have an interesting way to select what projects they pursue and which not: Whenever they get an idea about a project, they try to kill the idea as fast as possible. Astro Teller talked about this in an interview with Adam Savage: https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414
Can't help but think how many services were stopped in order to build those features in G+ which eventually failed as well. At least we got Google Photos out of it which seems to be a great app. Hope it lives long enough.
How about Google Glass? In all fairness though, quite a few are only dead as standalone products but have merged into other offerings. Take Google Gears for example - offline storage, worker threads and other APIs for browsers, all of which is now part of regular Chrome.
Glass is still around and under active development, it just isn't a consumer product. It is in use by several enterprises, mostly factories and warehouses.
My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially intended.
Even after 5+ years, I still miss Google Reader almost everyday. Just pure simplicity and tight community around sharing is yet to be matched IMO. Web has moved on and as someone commented here, it’s walled garden everywhere now.
Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long as you did!
Ehh, the old reader has scratched that itch for me ever since. And I like that it's a company dedicated to it rather than an irrelevant side product of a much larger company that doesn't really care about it, since it's a large part of my weekly life.
Not to my taste. I guess you must use some App to read the feed? I just launched home page on the phone and it’s far from ideal. Take a look at this screenshot. https://ibb.co/hwFJXA
I think you're misunderstanding why Google has been criticized wrt Reader. The problem was that Google first ruined the RSS ecosystem, then pulled out of it and tried to lead users elsewhere, leaving torched earth behind.
I miss Google reader as well but it’s demise gave me opportunity to check out Apple News. I am actually surprised how much better it is. They aggregate from opposing news sources very nicely (for example, Fox vs MSNBC) so you get to see two sides of each story. Apple News app can really open your eyes to things you don’t explore while Google Reader seem to kept recommending similar things over and over.
Google Spaces lived for so short, it is not included in the list and so far nobody has mentioned it in the comments. It was a product that me and my friends have long thought of. I think if it were implemented in a way that focused on chat but not on shared links, it could have been a success. I still believe that niche future will find its way into a popular chat application.
For companies that continue to innovate, product failures and deprecations are only to be expected. It's not unlike startups that fail for all sorts of reasons?
I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite, after all.
GWT is, if not dead, at least in a deliberately induced coma. And unlike some of the other items it wasn’t a consumer product, it was a heavily evangelized framework that companies and developers invested in and then were left high and dry.
GWT users are doing ok. Yeah development is slow compared to when they had a bazillion engineers working on it during the Wave era... on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added. In the mean time, standard browser changes like source maps have really helped over the old days of browser plugins.
GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run. That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but it's waning as well.
I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have much shelf life.
> on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added.
People wrote stuff on top of each one of those “overengineered crap” pivots.
It’s nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that’s of little use to people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat story has always been terrible because google.
Also it’s was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund open source foundation) for more than twenty years.
That overengineered crap still works? I mean, it was never a necessary part of gwt. There are a bunch of crappy react patterns you could use and we don't blame the core libray. Personally I think redux is overdue for a reckoning.
I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great.
I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing missing is a modern widget framework.
I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop of JS frameworks.
352 comments
[ 210 ms ] story [ 2083 ms ] threadI definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader.
But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and age of Google.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google...
...and I suspect there’s many that aren’t listed at Wikipedia.
Really? Allo is(was) a great little chat app. Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.
It's not that I hate Allo, I just prefer Hangouts. That might seem orthogonal, but a part of me worries that at some point in the future Hangouts will be deprecated in favor of Allo.
Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes.
Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"
So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.
Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.
YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).
Video hosting is a substantially different product. I don't see why Google should have owned it more than any other web company at the time, including YouTube itself.
Google already owned Blogger at that time, and I think with some hindsight you can say they always had a half-hearted interest in things "social". YouTube has a large social component of course. That is obvious now, but you could have easily imagined something less social back then.
The whole military runs on Windows, Exchange, Office. AWS runs major data centers for them. RedHat, IBM, Intel ... who hasn’t done work for the military or intelligence apparatus?
I think back then they had a very good chance to outgrow facebook and lead the "open web" forward. Instead they went all in with G+ and its early variants.
Now they have to work with facebook to index its content.
By measure of "cool kid technological fore-runner" IBM has been dead since the early 80s.
Or perhaps more hilariously:
http://excite.com/
reminder that google wanted to sell to excite.com for $750,000, excite.com said no.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
All i wanted to say is that dying is not related to market value.
Die as in bankrupt or not profitable is a big stretch for its use as a metaphor. Im not sure how to put this without sounding patronizing and/or stupid and/or explaining to retards but:
There are more things in life besides money or economical viability.
One could argue that afk it is way more easy to use it metaphorically to stereotype those that have money than those who do not.
They're comparable in profit to Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent.
GM and Micron have ridiculously low PE ratios. That also says nothing about whether their businesses are at risk of dying.
Inbox was good because it was not Gmail, not because Gmail lacked features from it.
Other specific features are missing that help with email fatigue. As far as I know, there's no way for me to tell gmail to group a set of emails together and only alert / show them to me once per day at a certain time, like you can with Inbox. I can't create custom bundles to hide large groups of emails I don't want to accidentally bury other content (without actually removing them from the inbox). Gmail kind of has the "tabbed inbox", but you can't configure the categories with the flexibility that bundles had. In Inbox, I feel like I can control how much email interrupts me without also missing anything important. I don't get this same feeling with gmail.
The Inbox product as a whole had a strong focus on trying to reduce the interruption of your email and keep your inbox clean. While gmail has taken in some of the features, it hasn't absorbed the core goal of the project.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/...
Well... that worked.
Who here knows what Dodgeball, Jaiku, Sidewiki or Fast Flip were?
Hell, to be honest, even within the valley, I often meet people that don't even know what more "popular" products like Wave or iGoogle were.
All these has real consequences. Other day I was looking to buy a movie and it was available on Amazon as well as YouTube, I went to Amazon because YouTube feels much more likely to shutdown it’s movie business on a whim while Amazon will likely fight out to last moment. Same goes for buying music.
In other words the list is padded IMO. Services that actually shut down like Wave for Google+ or Reader are in a different category than services who just became part of some other product.
But the discontinuations at Google? Gone gone gone. I can't even keep a copy around for my own use. That's one reason why I dislike web applications.
I'd hate to be the poor soul who encounters this error message and finds no information about it except the source code.
Specifically, the branch is only reachable if the PID is not what was expected, or the location that the macro was supposed to longjmp to is not set, which would be fatal defects.
Debian Code Search doesn’t crawl, but it indexes all software in Debian, which is typically helpful enough :)
I guess code search is just too niche with no marketability to ever improve
There's also at least one version of the OpenCart admin search which was designed so poorly that it didn't actually search based on whether the term was anywhere in the page title/content, but whether the title started with the search term (I think they'd screwed up the MySQL syntax). That was interesting.
Either way, search on a system not designed as a search engine is usually okay at best, absolutely terrible at worst.
A lot of ordinary British things are seen in the U.S. through a filter of... let's call it "quaintness."
Swear words. Thatched roofs. Music on AM radio.
So, yeah. Whatever offensive word you heard probably didn't have the same impact on the other side of the Atlantic. There's probably some reciprocity, too.
Brits have their own quaintness filter for some of the words that NorthAms see as out of bounds.
https://cs.chromium.org/
You can still use it as an outsider to search Chromium:
https://cs.chromium.org/
https://cs.chromium.org/search/?q=%5Cb%5BA-Z0-9._%25%2B-%5D%...
Considering that one can't 'index by regex', I wonder how the backend works - does it actually run the regex against every source code line in the repository in a few hundred milliseconds? Sounds expensive! They must have thousands of machines! Maybe thats why they don't have a public codesearch tool for the whole internet...
And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google properties.
Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH move.
https://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects
It's worth noting that even as someone who frequents tech and hackernews frequently, I still didn't know what half the stuff on there was. Things like Dodgeball, Jaiku, Gears, Fast Flip, Urchin or Aardvark. Never even heard these names before.
They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for their money.
Maybe it's because their goto is analytics and "how can monetize this?" instead of "what do users want? what do they need?"
Both of these had a sizable user-base that would have been leveraged, as opposed to G+ starting from zero.
just kidding. Hey Google: [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right?
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EDIT: this was flagged while going up and down and up and down in points. I've now replaced the parts in brackets with neutral language, previously it was expressed strongly and colloquially.
I just wrote you what's up:
>The product management team was replaced with people [who unfortunately are not qualified to hold their position.] (I imagine)
I also wrote the solution:
>Hey Google: : [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right?
It's rare that a fix like this is so easy and decisive. So easy. I'm absolutely serious.
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I've edited the comment for more neutral language (previously it was colloquial.)
It also was mentioned that they are working on a refactoring, but alas, it's painful for me too.
Gmail is not Google's product.
A product is something you sell. (Or something that facilitates making sales.)
Gmail is just a high-tech clickbait and data gathering honeypot.
I'm totally behind everything Google has done on this front since 1999-2018 and for the foreseeable future. Zero issue. They have earned my trust and maintain it. (serious comment)
My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long as you did!
Would love to know what’s your setup on the go.
The app isn't updated all that often, but then again, it doesn't really need it.
[1]: http://www.reederapp.com [2]: https://ibb.co/h008HA
I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite, after all.
I like Inbox still. I was using gmail like i was using inbox before the product existed.
Oh well, when you live on the edge, sometimes you get cut. guitar riff
GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run. That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but it's waning as well.
I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have much shelf life.
People wrote stuff on top of each one of those “overengineered crap” pivots.
It’s nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that’s of little use to people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat story has always been terrible because google.
Also it’s was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund open source foundation) for more than twenty years.
I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great.
I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing missing is a modern widget framework.
I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop of JS frameworks.