[keltex]

This is something Google Cloud should learn from. It doesn't matter if product XX still makes money or fits in your business model. There are people who rely on it. And they'll remember if the vendor kept it running trouble free for years. They'll also remember if it was arbitrarily shut down or the price was suddenly increased by 4x and they had to spend many man hours migrating to another option. (Google maps api?)

Then in the future when that same person is responsibly for choosing a vendor for a new project, they'll remember.

[resolutebat]

Google Cloud officially deprecated its EC2 Classic equivalent, legacy networks, years ago but they're still running just fine:

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/legacy

[rgoulter]

https://goomics.net/50/

[panarky]

I'm experiencing a bizarre sense of unreality reading comments on a story about Amazon killing EC2-Classic, where the first line is "Retiring services isn’t something we do", while having just read yet another email from Amazon warning me about all my files stored in the defunct Amazon Drive, and somehow 90% of the discussion is about a completely different company discontinuing products.

[twothamendment]

We had some classic ec-2. They gave plenty of warning and migration was easy. I think Google is being brought up so much because that isn't the typical Google experience when they kill things off.

I get your point, if AI were training on this content it might conclude that Google killed off its ec-2 product.

[wmf]

AWS is pretty separate from consumer Amazon.

[master_crab]

Yup was going to say. AWS treats its customers a bit differently than retail Amazon. The latter cuts services faster than Google.

[jdboyd]

If I'm not mistaken, Amazon Drive is not part of AWS's services. Certainly Amazon's consumer cloud services have had some big changes over time.

[hotstickyballs]

Sounds to me like a rug pull is imminent

[flir]

Google Reader. Never forget.

[sneak]

I miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced with local software or Feedly.

Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail with a very short notice period.

The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day. Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something Google will eventually try to engineer away.

[Galanwe]

It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.

[brianshaler]

For me it's when they stopped showing results that include your keywords and instead a random smattering of anything broadly related to the topic being searched for.

[jvolkman]

You can use quotes around keywords.

https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

[jdgoesmarching]

I’ve had google searches disregard my quoted query.

[dekhn]

even quotes don't work 100% of the time- if there is strong signal to show another result, it will be shown even if it isn't a quote-match. Previous user clicks are the top ranking signal.

IIUC "verbatim mode" is supposed to do something like this. https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

[geraldcombs]

This shifted from "can" to "absolutely have to" a long time ago for my use cases.

[otabdeveloper4]

Often it's not even related at all.

For example, Google often prioritizes obscure music bands or albums even for generic or well-known terms.

[gjvc]

Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?

[ok123456]

Not bad enough to be outright spam with just enough relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try finding product reviews, or product comparison articles. It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

[HeckFeck]

It's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article and it begins with several worthless paragraphs describing why someone would be interested in the topic and how things can sometimes go wrong...

Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here.

It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy' but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll several screens to find what I need.

[mschuster91]

> It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

Or some site that "aggregates" Stackoverflow, Quora and whatnot. Pure hell and I wish everything bad possible on this planet to the people who have implemented this kind of scam.

[swader999]

And the content itself is just a reflection of the search. Whole web is turning to rot such that the only few remaining great sites don't even need indexing because well there's so few left.

[thesuperbigfrog]

Not OP.

I believe "minimaxed" in this context refers to optimizing profits while trying to keep search results useful to users.

The term comes from game theory where a player tries to maximize their gains while minimizing their losses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

[moomin]

But Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model of social networking? Never came back.

[sneak]

That wasn't Reader, that was apps. Nobody uses the web anymore except as API transport for native apps. Blame Android and Apple for that.

[Kuinox]

I started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's difficult to get back on google, the results are so much worse.

[xnx]

What's an example search that's better on Kagi?

[recursive]

"Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other ones are better too.

[freeAgent]

Funny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results were also (significantly) farther away yet no more relevant than Kagi's.

So...yes. Radiator.

[kibwen]

> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care

Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.

[nine_k]

AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine.

Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium.

Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million.

Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.

[kibwen]

YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.

[nine_k]

Unlike Gmail, YouTube is a large public repository of media.

Pulling your email account from Gmail affects you. Pulling a video from YouTube affects potentially huge numbers of people.

[macintux]

If the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple alternatives, it would immediately become far less useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube’s value proposition for me.

[RektBoy]

What ADs? Install uBlock.

[earthboundkid]

I am fucking pissed at how Google created tons of make work for me by killing old Universal Analytics and replacing it with an inferior product.

OTOH, I successfully skipped the whole AMP saga because I could tell from the start that it was bullshit.

[jonas21]

Universal Analytics used third-party cookies. Support for them has been removed from all major browsers due to privacy issues.

[earthboundkid]

So you adapt to that. Adapting to changes does not require any of the crap in GA4.

[voytec]

I see Reader as Google's attack on RSS' popularity. The product was killed off when its job was accomplished.

[lolinder]

Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put together by a team that really cared about it, but always had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot of their key people before it imploded:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.

[nostrademons]

Three greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of having Google product strategy set by executives who were accountable to the CEO/CFO rather than users/customers, vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture change is the root of the issues we're talking about in this thread.

[slyall]

No because if anything (the effect might have been small) it reduced the power of the open web and many websites (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc ) which are controlled by other companies.

[flir]

A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small.

I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.

[freeAgent]

What's frustrating is that Reader would have been complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge funnel by which users could discover content to share on Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the time I found content that I shared other places, such as Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).

[wombat-man]

I think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it needed to justify the upkeep.

[lolinder]

The upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was more that Google doesn't care to operate any product unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.

[mike_hearn]

By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the servers just kept on trucking.

[dylan604]

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

[LamaOfRuin]

Having basically all their users (well, as much as for any of their revenue generating products anyway) be revenue generating would require practically no effort for google specifically. It fit their revenue model perfectly. It is trivial to put the exact same ads in there as they already had on search and gmail, and it is stickier than search or gmail.

[wombat-man]

Broadly, I think some business models are better suited for smaller companies than Google for sure.

Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger audiences.

[wombat-man]

I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what the decision process on that was.

[mike_hearn]

Many blogs have ads on them. So you'd be stripping ads and replacing them with your own - not cool.

[justinpombrio]

Obligatory reminder that RSS is alive and well. It remains popular. I both subscribe to RSS, and support it on my blog. You can too.

[flir]

Still use it - I even read HN via RSS - but I've never found a tool with the critical mass of users you need to show trending content the way GR did.

[freeAgent]

That's true. I use Newsblur. It has social features, but the community is so small and the social aspect is so limited that it has little value. With that said, the people who engage with it tend to be authentic users interested in high-quality content and respectful discussion. Discovery of other users is terrible, though. You basically have to stumble upon them if they're interacting with an article already in your RSS feeds.

[flir]

theoldreader, same problem.

Idle musing 1: A mechanism for all these small readers to federate their trending content? Out of many comes one?

Idle musing 2: These tools were mostly written a decade ago. It might be possible, with the current state of the art, to extract a more useful signal out of a smaller pool of users.

[weinzierl]

I agree with everything you wrote, except for the very last sentence. This is just wishful thinking. First of all "when the same person is responsible" is a very big if, and then no two buying decisions are the same and even if the person with decision-making power remembers it'll be just one point on a long list.

[rob74]

OTOH, I have a feeling that "nobody ever got fired for choosing AWS" will become the new "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", so...

[ilyt]

Sure but if you ask online and those people will be yelling "dont pick <company> they will pull a rug from under you" at every occasion...

[bilalq]

Google clearly doesn't care about their reputation. Their shutdown of Pixel Pass before users got a chance to upgrade was just ridiculous[1]. It's hard to quantify the impact that this poor reputation has on their business. Their revenue is still growing, but it's definitely not where it could be.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23851107/google-graveyard...

[mongol]

That's a good point. But I am curious how special this Classic offering was, compared to what came after. Would migration have been hard?

[snewman]

It's not so much that EC2 Classic offered any features that were difficult to live without. It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period. You need to move all of your systems, including any data stored on those systems (in instance store or EBS), to effectively a new data center. Migrating a live production environment can be a pain and/or cause downtime.

[brianshaler]

It's also worth remembering that infrastructure stuck on EC2 Classic would have been built so long ago it may predate modern cloud tooling and even modern best practices around reproducibility and CI/CD.

(EC2 user since 2010)

[MichaelZuo]

This. Unless a written guarantee could be offered by the cloud provider that migration will be absolutely trouble free, why wouldn't customers just stick to what they know works?

And if they're not willing to provide a written guarantee, then that says a lot.

[snewman]

In this scenario, it's nothing to do with the cloud provider. Migrating a live production system is inherently difficult. You can make a reasonable analogy to moving houses – say, with two kids who are in school, and while you and your spouse are both working. No matter what guarantees you're given regarding the condition of the new house, simply moving all of your stuff (while you are using it) is a big hassle.

[MichaelZuo]

In this example, it wouldn't be the guarantees for the new house, which presumably would have been examined and accepted well beforehand, it would be guarantees for the moving process itself.

[acdha]

Exactly - and with fewer managed services back then they’d also be more likely to have hand-rolled servers doing things which you’d now try to hand off to a managed service. I remember entire servers running small tasks which you’d now have, say, CloudFront or an ALB invoking Lambdas or at least sending it to a container.

[knodi123]

> It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period.

Freudian slip?

[rakkhi]

Software engineering at Google even had a law for their

https://medium.com/se-101-software-engineering/what-is-the-h...