> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine
Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product...
EDIT:
Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0]
>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product
WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.
There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.
Click a result's three dots menu. Underneath all the main call to action buttons (Visit, share, save) is a Wikipedia description of the site. Underneath that is a "More about this page" button. On this separate page is a description of the company, social media links, reviews, generic results for the company, and, finally, some 1100px down, "See previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine" in a 14px font: https://imgur.com/a/IMgVDpV
What's the ETA for this being removed due to lack of use...
That’s probably a good thing, people who really do research old archived stuff will dig and find it but others who casually click won’t bring archive.org to its knees
It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).
I hope Google is NOT going to be a significant source of funding for the Internet Archive. Because I want to trust Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive to be unbiased.
Google likes to influence search results, hiding ones it doesn't like, and elevating those that the Company supports. Wayback Machine has been very reliable so far, I hope it stays that way.
Generally speaking, the Wayback Machine is not searchable in the fashion that Google is, there isn't a scale to put the thumb on.
(There are some tiny subsets which are rudimentarily full-text searchable; and some efforts to make domains findable. But nothing remotely like even Google 1.0 mapping URIs to organic terms.)
Which is really unfortunate because a lot of useful information is now essentially unfindable unless you know where it is. Maybe someone should start crawling and indexing the internet archive.
IA needs an alternative - an independent backup archive - more than it needs funding. Unless IA funding exceeds the entire US copyright lobbying industry there is always a chance they will cease to exist without enough notice to save the data somewhere else.
There is also the matter what IA will be able to archive. The the machine learning gold rush more and more site operators see dollar bills in front of them and are restricting who can crawl their content. Google is in a special position here because almost no one can affort not to be crawled by Google which is what made their cache especially valuable in addition to the IA.
Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save.
So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked.
I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
They aren't really fighting it, because they never picked a winnable battle.
Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.
"Pick a winnable fight" means the internet archive does not exist. Copyright in the US is very clear cut. There is no fight to "win" without changing the law.
That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.
The Internet Archive already pushed the boundaries and existed for long enough to make meaningful headway. They were winning the fight by picking the right battles and flying under the radar all the way up until they decided to completely overstep their mission and take on a fight that no one had any hope they would win.
I would agree, but IA did eventually add a mechanism for removing a site/copyrighted content entirely.
If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.
Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.
Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.
You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.
Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.
I'll believe it when the pragmatic someone will replicate the Archive in all but ebook lending. Exactly zero of these wise men have done anything which is what I expect from those who speak who never do.
Slavish "the man in the arena" worship isn't particularly audacious. Unquestioning support for audacity for the sake of it speaks to lack of discernment. And to parrot a HN truism- a failure to account for survivor bias.
By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.
It's not worship. It's an observation. Those who talk, say they would stop at a precise stopping point, but they never start. Those who do, almost always overshoot this precise stopping point that the talkers refer to. An IA that has the precise stopping point is possible today. But zero people have made it. This is not unique.
In fact, I'll tell you what, you make it and I will dedicate my ArchiveTeam Warrior to your project instead for a year.
You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
We have to stop prioritizing it over everything else. You can't compete in the global playground if you have impossible to implement entitlement programs. Priority has to be new work not existing work and definitely not the work of dead people. We have countless similar schemes were people are to be rewarded for things done long ago. One can't pretend it isn't slowing everything down.
Everyone just ignoring bad laws and contradicting them can remove laws too. But of course this is a niche topic that would never get such broad support.
A lot of people smoking weed is certainly a component for the prohibition to fail at some point.
Writing mails to legislative members isn't enough if you don't have any form of leverage.
Jury nullification is the real mechanism for We The People when we don't consent to be held to laws passed by They The Wealthy/Bribed Lawmakers
It requires that people refuse plea deals and demand jury trials, and that the jury is educated on what jury nullification is but when prosecutors can't get a conviction regardless of much evidence they have of guilt the laws will get changed or at least they stop being enforced.
AFAIU the jury doesn't have final say in civil trials so this would only work partially (copyright infringement can be both a civil dispute as well as a criminal matter).
They risked one of the greatest public goods in the history of humanity on a battle that everyone knew they would lose.
That's not an admirable underdog fight and it's not a glorious martyrdom, it's at best a naive slip up and at worst an ignoble organizational suicide attempt.
Change isn't going to happen because people recklessly throw themselves against the draconian laws and get annihilated by them—it will happen when people strategically set up a battle that they can win or persuade Congress to fix it.
Google Cache was useful because you could sometimes not find a term or keyword in the web site, but it would be in the cache. Or for sites that have gone offline, or no longer have the item. "It's still in the Google Cache!" you can't say that anymore.
I use Google less and less these days. What's the point when you can just ask an LLM, and it gives you an answer within seconds, with no ads? You can ask for references and links and it will give those to you too. I don't think I've ever been given a link to an SEO content farm, where as with Google search its the entire page. Google Search feels like Yahoo was (maybe even worse) right before it died and was replaced with Bing.
Another annoying scenario is when the search result isn't the actual page/article/… itself, but only a snippet within a site's own (paginated) index.
At the time Google had indexed that page, the article preview you were looking for was maybe on page 5 of that index, but by the time you're arriving, it might have moved to page 11 because of all the additional content that got added since then.
With online shops it's even worse, because there items get both added and possibly removed again, plus the default ordering usually isn't strictly chronologically but some sort of popularity-based or whatever algorithm, so something that originally was indexed on page 5 of the catalogue might by now be on page 2 or on page 12 or it might have been dropped from the inventory altogether.
Even worse are the related articles/posts some sites like to show next to the main content. It really shows Google's lack of progress that they still haven't figured out a way to handle these cases better.
> I would presume Google still has all this data. ...
Maybe - I guess that they must have served that "cached" content from DB-records that had it all saved directly (URL X has contents Y => basically a "mirror" of the terms that they indexed) => not having to store that "mirror" (only the search index) might save quite a lot of storage space (and I/O and CPU to decompress it, as users won't be requesting it anymore) => all in all that might save quite a lot of infrastructure costs $$$.
> Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access?
Maybe (if they decided to just get rid of the I/O related to the user requests), but on the other hand I don't know if previously any "Google-consumer" was ever able to perform mass-downloads of Google's "cached" data - could that be done without being banned by Google's webpage (or API)?
As I understand it, Google does a decent amount of rendering of a page before indexing; this a) allows it to index content loaded by JS and b) prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Perhaps Google's main way of storing a page no longer matches something that can be easily served as a cache page. This might be a way to remove a legacy copy of each page and reduce storage costs.
Just with youtube, the surface area of these services is getting smaller and smaller and you get less and less. Too much optimization to the detriment of users. All the while search is still rooted in 90s concepts and only serves as a money making thing.
I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm pretty sure it's been years since I have seen a Google result which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.
Sadly, not knowing what used to be, erases history.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
― George Orwell, 1984
This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
Ah the memories! I remember in my starting years. I was migrating a WordPress to new server. The db backup got corrupted in the process. Google cache helped me restore the blog entries. Crazy days!
Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your RAG?
The answer could be to push users to their AI offerings, or possibly due to bots scraping up the cached data for their own AI models, where Google wasn't making a profit off providing the data. Most likely the feature wasn't used enough for them to care, and they couldn't find a way to monetize it to make it worth keeping around.
Probably yes. Or websites that google has made scraping deals with don't want a cache of their content to be publically available and the easiests thing to do was to just turn off the pulic cache completely.
Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons. I'm guessing it's still available internally, along with snapshots going far, far back in time.
> Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons
This could be due to site owners contacting the IA and requesting their site be permanently removed from the archive. It's not as easy as pressing a button, but it's not difficult to have your site removed.
I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. It's more likely that the blacklist is a voluntary opt-in thing...
Many years ago Google Cache once saved a site I used to maintain/own, classic funny story, I accidentally deleted the production database when I was trying migrate it, but luckily all the data to recreate the latest posts (the most important for this japanese music-downloads-links WordPress site) was stored all in HTML attributes and some tags, so I created a script to scrap it all from Google Cache and recreated the DB as best as I could.
What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.
Archive.is seems even sketchier doesn’t it? Who is paying for all that? Total mystery. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just vanished one day. I feel like the solution is some version of local personal archive + zenodo plus those others.
That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
I really don’t understand killing this useful feature. Between this and the search results being bad, I don’t have much of a reason to visit Google anymore.
> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found.
My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.
> will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found
About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to.
The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior.
Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway.
This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
And it doesn't have to be malicious either. Sometimes a result used to be on page 47 and is no longer on page 47. Or it was in the "related links" section and that changes multiple times a day.
Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
Can someone ELI5 what google cache was and why it was important? Was it essentially a wayback machine alternative? People are upset about its removal; curious to understand why.
You could access a snapshot of the page that was taken when google was indexing it.
It is helpful if the site content changed or was removed shortly after google indexed it. This often lead to wrong search result preview texts which you could still find in the cache. The internet archive has a different focus and maybe you won't find the missing information that google has indexed there.
Right, that was the real value of the feature: you got to see what Google saw or thought it saw. Plenty of sites serve different things to Googlebot and the Google cache could often help untangle that mess.
Bing has it. The "Cached" link is in a little dropdown arrow menu behind the result's title.
Agreed that the Wayback Machine is not a replacement. There is a long delay before things show up there, if they do at all. If a page was going through technical difficulties and was unreachable, Google Cache was usually the only way to still access it.
I also don't understand where Google Guy gets this from:
"[…] it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved."
It can't only be me who feels that website reliability has dramatically crashed over the past decade or so, and it keeps getting worse.
quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.
I have seen a push in the past year or so for saving storage across Google products. Caching the Internet takes a lot of storage. I suspect that's why they've removed it.
I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.
I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems to be the case though because the cached versions would often contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use this trick to read any nikkei article.
I didn't mean to say that noarchive is only a google thing. My only point was that my assumption is that until now if Google didn't cache your site its contents would not be used for SEO.
Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.
I hardly use Google search anymore. I think Google search wil also be dead soo .
For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere.
Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes.
Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)"
The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99.
I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.
It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant provider of email/office SaaS.
But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the institional momentum is just so huge that it's very likely Google simply doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little incentive to behave differently they may actually have an atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be important, even if they were aware of cultural momentum shifts and were willing/able to persuade others at Google to change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to learn?
It's a mistake that's made over and over again in tech. Back when Atari was printing money in the late 70s and early 80s the leadership and marketing people literally didn't know what to do that would help or hurt their business. Literally anything they did brought in more profits than they knew what to do with.
It caused them to make wild mistakes that jeopardized the long term viability of the company like milking their core product well after it had served its time in the market and neglecting, shutting down, or even warehousing everything else (sound familiar?).
It took some really forceful misunderstanding of their marketspace by clueless executives to finally bring Atari down and have it sold off for parts. And that's where Google's fate diverges from the historic lesson, Google won't die because its stuff its sales channels full of more hardware than they can sell (tying up every dollar in the company). Google will die because it's core product, ad placement, is become less valuable, causing the company to optimize trying to capture that main source of revenue -- which is realized in a total lack of strategy to build literally any other business.
They'd have to be aware because people have gotten wary of anything new from the company, due to the fears it'll be killed in a year or two. That's not a huge issue right now (since Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Docs, etc are huge), but it does make it more difficult for them to compete if the technological landscape changes and leaves them behind.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
It matters because the HN crowd maybe small when it comes consumer products , but is a dominant factor for cloud purchases.
Having been burnt too many times with Google products[1] I try not use their offerings on the cloud many decision makers are here who will worry about similar issues.
If Google wants to be serious about Cloud then they need to be serious about long term support.
Microsoft in the win 3 /9x days till even win 7 was exceptionally consistent about ABI support even adding specific behaviors to support a single binary to make sure upgrades just worked. That kind of culture was a key factor that made developers want to develop on their platforms
—-
[1] just this week having to start work on upcoming firebase dynamic link deprecation.
While google had given a long lead time and announced the sunsetting years ahead , I still don’t have to worry about similar issues on AWS nearly as often.
Honestly, who is going to be comfortable staking their name on adopting Google's AI offerings? I have talked so many people out of wasting their effort supporting it simply by pointing to all the rug pulls Google has done.
I'm pretty sure people who used google's web cache comprised a tiny fraction of one percent of their entire user base, and this move doesn't even put the tiniest ding in their brand.
Feel free to criticize Mozilla all you like, but this is a prime example of myopic tech-bubble thinking that is being decried elsewhere in this thread. Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome for free on what was then the most valuable web real estate in the world (the Google home page), then because they paid software installers to use dark patterns to automatically install Chrome and set it as the default browser without the user's consent, and then because they optimized all of Google's popular properties to work best in Chrome and only begrudgingly in other browsers, and then because they shipped it as the default browser on the OS that Google controls. There's not a single thing that Mozilla could have done to stop Chrome, short of making their own phone OS where they could ship Firefox as the default, which they did in fact attempt.
Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome
Yes, indeed. This may or may not have been wrong of Google, however this is also called "competition". And what did Mozilla do?
It flinched.
Many users loved Firefox, and disliked that Chrome had barely any ability to customize anything when released. It was literally years before you could change even the most basic things about the interface. When released, almost nothing could be configured about it, and it was a far cry from Firefox's ability to give the user what they wanted.
Firefox's response to Chrome's minor speed improvements? Was to literally begin a campaign to become the enemy. Firefox devs worked diligently to make Firefox a second rate clone of Chrome. They removed features, configuration, the ability to modify the interface, and more.
Mozilla could have so easily kept all that configurability, its strong point, its unique factor, but instead panicked. And in doing so it rendered itself incapable of competing on any footing.
Put another way, yes Google had vast resources. Yet this is precisely why you never compete on the same footing as them. You instead compete on what they do not have.
And that was the ability to theme Firefox, to configure it as you wanted, to turn off features you did not want, and more. Chrome had none of this initially. And Google is literally famous for, and incapable of listening to users. They're not built for it. Mozilla was.
And they threw all those strengths away, the only way they could compete with Chrome.
So yes, there were things they could have done. And yes, endless people told them that in bug reports, in emails to them, and more. If anyone's thinking here is myopic (great personal attack, btw), it was Mozilla's.
I do agree that perspective is more accurate; Chrome was always going to be huge with a combination of Google's development effort and advertising. However Mozilla's leadership have done an unimpressive job. They took a large amount of money from Google, decided that their vision of how the internet should work was identical to Google's, then converged Firefox to being an inferior Chrome clone. Brave does a better job of articulating a different vision of the web than Firefox and it is a Chrome fork; the situation is a bit ridiculous [0, 1]. And Brave's crypto scheme, while maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, is a radical re-imagination of how the web could be commercialised. So there is clearly room to imagine an internet other than the one Google wants where everyone has Google Ads.
So yes, Google was going to win the fight Mozilla picked, but Mozilla picked a losing strategy.
That's just pure copium. Sure, google's tactics helped speed things along but remember that Firefox was originally able to gain marketshare against a browser that didn't even need to pull those tricks because it was already preinstalled on every PC.
I love Firefox (fork) it is my only browser but you can see the long term trend and I do wonder if it will even be a thing in a decades time. Unless there is a sudden shift towards it, is will eventually be relegated to the last of the most devoted geeks as we watch it wither away at the hands of the tech giants running the net.
A big thing was when they cut the Servo team that was when I knew they had sort of given up on trying to push forward but merely follow.
I had not thought of that. That is probably very likely. They can keep their public mantra of "privacy" to keep people coming to them but without the burden of tech development. Higher ups like that equation.
It is probably inevitable, I mean if even Microsoft couldnt fight off Googles browser dominance, what hope does Mozilla have long term.
I am hoping that Mozilla goes down that route. It might be the kick needed to get another more reponsible party to take over the stewardship of Gecko and the browser built upon it.
Not just HN. In my autocracy every housewife knew about Google cache — it was the easiest way to read information the government doesn't want you to read, and it was free and always available unlike many blocked VPNs (and what shady proxy companies call "VPNs").
It adds up over time. I used and liked Google domains for a bunch of websites, and was disappointed when that was axed and all my domains moved to squarespace (and have since transferred them all out). I used the Google podcast app on my phone, and that was killed and replaced by YouTube music which is a horrible replacement.
I used to buy in heavily to the Google ecosystem and trust it as a pretty solid go to option for anything they offered, now I'd be really hesitant to use it for anything critical. I have even been wondering if my longstanding gmail email address will someday be a liability.
Those two examples were probably smaller services but had their effects on different populations. When you add up all the things that have been ended by Google it can really contribute to their overall brand image. Some things can trickle down from more technical users to less technical. I think chrome was first adopted by a highly tech literate population before breaking into the mainstream, and if that population starts to mistrust Google it could hurt them in the long run.
I think there has been a pretty major shift in Google culture and product strategy and I'm not a fan of it.
It became apparent they are a zombie company once I realized I no longer put any brainspace into learning new functionality/tools Google offered. They are a corporation living off the corpse of who they have been. Total zombie company that doesn't realize it's dead yet.
What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life? Instead of adding Google Quickshare to share files from my PC to Android I use Microsoft's Phone Link. That is the first time in my life I've picked a Microsoft product over a Google one. It also just works better and doesn't require I have bluetooth enabled on both devices.
> What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life?
Gemini. Maybe you prefer ChatGPT, but either way the product category is a huge improvement to daily life for a lot of people. And transformers were invented at Google.
And Waymo is on its way to being huge. Might eventually make Google more money than everything it's done before.
As far as I can tell, innovation seems alive and well at Google. But a lot of their product categories are simply "mature" by now -- you're not going to see some wild transformation of YouTube, or Docs and Drive, or Android. Same as you're not seeing some wild reinvention of Apple Music, or iCloud, or iOS.
I tried Gemini in Google assistant for 5 minutes. It is not hyperbole to say it completely broke every feature I used assistant for and I reverted back instantly.
I am never getting into a Google powered vehicle. They aren't 2000s genius Google, they are 2024 'We're getting rid of Google Cache' Google that prioritizes a buck over good tech. I'm not trusting that mindset with my life.
Yes. They are the new Oracle. And like Oracle, they won't care how much their brand stinks like a fish market on a hot summer's day because they'll still be raking in enough cash not to care.
I recently started with YouTubeTV, and its great. And Waymo is coming to my town soon. So I agree, lots of abandoned products, but still quite a few good ones.
I have an original Chromecast and it still works, though pairing it with a new TV is a bit of a pain.
The new Google TV is more like a smart TV without the TV. It has apps you install. It's much more complex and not the same thing at all. I was disappointed.
But then again every company discontinues products. I don't see that as a breach of trust. It's making up a promise they never made and criticizing them for it.
I've not been so lucky. Google went into partnership with Asus years ago and released the Nexus player, which I had. An expensive streaming player that within a year bricked itself due to Google's update. Many people were upset and when asked for support on the official forums, Google said it was in Asus' hands and of course Asus said the same of Google. I checked for updates at least a year thereafter but there was no fix, the thing was hard-bricked and hundreds of people had useless hockey pucks. Never again, Google.
Aww man, I worked on the chromecast SoC. It was a... difficult product. If there was a more perfect example of a product being killed by penny pinching, I can't think of one. It just didn't have enough flash for anything but a super cut down android. We had to drop multilib - the SoC and everything supported 64bit, just there wasn't enough space for the libraries. And the cheapest, bargin-basement flash as well - causing so many to be bricked trying to update. Plus 1gb ram, when even entry level phones were shipping with 2gb - just a couple of 4k framebuffers and the video decode reference frames meant there was pretty much nothing left for the apps themselves. So 1080p was it's limit despite having a capable video decoder and output.
And for ages afterwards they would use it as a reference device for google TV and testing for play store certification - just as they were pushing 64-bit only as a valid app path. So many things were only missing from the google tv play store for years afterwards because they just wouldn't function on those things.
Yes, casting from your phone still works. However, it requires a Google login to set up and automatically downloads a bunch of apps you probably don't want if all you care about is playing movies and YouTube videos from your phone. I suppose you could create an account just for this, but you really shouldn't need an account at all.
It was a gift for a relative: a "Chromecast with Google TV." I didn't know what it really was when I bought it. Taking "Chromecast" out of the name makes sense.
The original concept was great, but I guess it doesn't sell anymore?
The original concept was great for some things, sure.
I bought an OG Chromecast over a decade ago. It was a one-trick pony: Push "cast" button on pocket computer, and whatever I was doing there would show up on the BFT.
Which is great, you know, for a person who lives alone and never has visitors: One can select an item from the slick interface provided by the service they subscribe to on their amazing personal computing device and it appears magically on the big screen. The control buttons are there on the pocket computer, too. It Just Works.
However, it is an awful experience for someone who wishes to watch a film together with others: My personal pocket computer is not really set up to be shared with others (and the live screencast function of Chromecast, while functional, has really high latency for interactive tasks).
And if someone else wants to pick something to watch using their own personal pocket computer, then they can of course do so -- but theirs is also not meant to be a shared experience, and they won't be able to use the services that I pay to use in my home.
So fine. A film is selected, however that is done, and it is playing. But it's time to pause it so someone can use the bathroom. Do I use my phone for my Chromecast for the movie my friend picked on their phone? I already had to hide the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Or do I have my friend fumble around with this potentially-unfamiliar interface on their own (locked) pocket computer to pause it? What if they stepped away? Do I find the Home app on my own pocket computer, open it, find the devices page, find the appropriate Chromecast device, and then finally fucking pause it? (Fuck you. I just want to go take a fucking piss.)
Back then, it was a much better experience in my household to use a PS3 for streaming: It had a regular remote control that -- as a design intent -- anyone could pick up and operate. Browsing possible selections was done on the BFT that was visible to all interested parties. My roommate didn't get a notification on their phone that encouraged them fuck with me from a different area of the house. It was a much better experience for those who didn't live a life of absolute solitude.
Today, it's still that way -- except nowadays I have [what is sometimes referred to as] a GCWGTV. It can behave like an OG Chromecast (what UI???), or it can behave like a human-centric streaming device with its own GUI and dedicated physical remote control that anyone can pick up and use, browsing Netflix or Plex or whatever in a manner very similar to what we were doing on a PS3 back in the day.
> I already hid the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Honestly that sounds far more like your roommate being an ass than some failure of the technology. If you had to tape over the IR sensor because your roommate kept blasting the IR power off signal for your TV, would you also blame the IR sensor?
Either way, my TV remotes which support CEC that have play/pause buttons on them can play/pause content on my OG chromecast.
When an IR remote starts putting notifications on any and every phone that happens to be on the network that let them very easily fuck up my streaming experience, then it may be possible to start drawing parallels. Until then, they're very different concepts.
(And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.)
I'd still say its 99% having a shitty roommate. I don't know why you'd excuse their shit behavior on having a button to do it.
> And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.
Eh. I've had a few dozen AV setups of "moderate" complexity (multiple game consoles/streaming boxes, AV receiver, BD player, TV) and never really had bad experiences. Often things just work when I've turned them on. And honestly most of the time with things running my OG Chromecasts its the only actual device on the setup (a stand-alone TV mounted someplace like in the garage or kitchen or patio).
Did the TV B Gone manifest itself from nothing and present that manifestation on my asshole roommate's personal pocket computer with zero action on their part?
Mine worked great. Had Chromecasts in every room and a few Google Home minis. Anyone in the house could just say "Hey Google, play [WhatEverTheFuckTheyWant] from [AnyStreamingServiceIHave] on [TheTVOfTheirChoice]" it really was great, but for some reason it stopped working most of the time about 18 months and has continually degraded.
I can see how that works for you, but it’s a lot simpler for us. If I picked the movie then I pause it when someone asks. If my wife picked the movie then she pauses it.
With a Real Remote Control (that nobody owns except for the coffee table that nobody owns): Anyone involved in a group viewing can just push the pause button when that is useful for one or more members of that group.
Nobody's locked-down personal pocket computer needs to be involved at all for this most mundane task.
At home, it just pops up for everyone on the local network so anyone can do it. Works nicely for us to be honest. I quite like it. And the remote works too. Overall, I’m quite happy with this stuff.
The only thing is that if you set up with all HomePods you can have your TV audio go to them too in stereo. Very cool. And Google doesn’t have that feature.
The remote does work. This is an added convenience. To be clear, the remote continues to work. At no point does the remote stop working. If you use your phone to cast, the neighbour can still use the remote to pause. If you don't give the neighbour the SSID, he can still use the remote. Your neighbour does not need to be on your network. If he's on your network the remote and his phone will work. If he's off your network, the remote will work. The remote will not stop working. Hope that clarifies.
The original argument was in favor of the OG Chromecast's method, wherein: There is no dedicated remote laying around that anyone can pick up and unambiguously make work.
It is good to have options.
(And modern Google-produced streaming devices, whether they are good or bad, do provide options.)
I have several Chromecasts in my TVs. Keeping them paired with mobile devices has become a nightmare. They frequently disconnect, often immediately after queuing videos. They never used to behave this way
The silver lining is that I have been finding some better alternatives to both Chromecast and YouTube. I have some Amazon Firesticks with Kodi installed that are pointed at my media-filled NAS, including videos I fetched previously with yt-dlp
I am also considering moving everything over to something like Intel PC sticks and possibly running Kodi off of those eventually. Then I can have all of the smart features I need without any ads or without any of the devices obsoleting themselves beyond my control
I've run Kodi for a while, raspberry pis and fire sticks mostly. Right now the best setup I have is on old Chromeboxes running libreelec or retroelec if I want gaming. It's pretty great. Chromebox G1 is like max $50 or less. They are way faster than any non X86 based hardware I've tried. The only downside is the lack of HDMI-CEC so I have to use either my phone, a gaming controller or some sort of Bluetooth remote to control it. I have installed Bliss OS on some Chromeboxes and it works well but haven't tried running Kodi on top of it. Might work well if I need access to any specific apps.
Before Stadia came out, I specifically warned people not to get invested in it because Google will just shut it down in 2 years, and all their games and save files will be gone forever. I was dead right, and as far as I'm concerned that's the final nail in the coffin for trusting anything Google makes. Anything that isn't a major core product will be abandoned immediately, it's just not worth the risk.
Unfortunately my TV is built on the Google TV OS, which probably means all smart features will be unusable in six months.
I'm aware of Google's history of shutting down services... but...
> And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
Will you have no trouble buying a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick though?
Those are also paper weights once the company decides to stop supporting them - and I'm not aware of any consumer electronics that allows you to install your own software on it.
Seems like a strange swipe at Google, even though your complaints apply to all of these devices regardless of brand.
For what it's worth - Google's latest phones, Pixel 9, boast 7 years of updates and support.
I think GP's point was specifically Google's famous history of starting projects and then shutting them down within a few years. Old Rokus still work. My Roku 3600 is eight years old.
My old Roku is now so sluggish and slow, it's a paper weight and I had to buy a new one.
All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable. GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite updates forever? Zero.
Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name. None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google kills things all the time" complaint.
If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's about legitimate things.
My Chromecast is 11 years old and still works fine. Sometimes YouTube thinks it can try playing back the higher bitrate 4k version of a video and it'll get choppy but I've never had issues with 1080p content.
My older Roku 2 is effectively unusable as most apps are just outrageously sluggish and videos often crash loading.
The "Google Chromecast with Android TV" was a stick that was sold for $25, and it runs full Android TV. Google would have to abandon Android TV before it would be bricked.
They were sold as cable box replacements, running the YouTube TV app, rather than their ability to "cast" a phone screen to a TV.
It's called "Chromecast with Google TV" and it wasn't $25 until they made the cheaper version that doesn't do 4k.
Afaik Google TV is to Android TV what Pixel OS is to Android. Both the "Chromecast with Google TV" and the new "Google TV Streamer" are technically running "full Android TV".
Also they were sold mainly as a Roku/Fire stick competitor. Maybe they marketed it alongside YouTube TV but also there's a dedicated Netflix button on the remote.
Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia Shield. Really nice for travel.
> I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
You can install LineageOS on it today.
If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
yes, of course. there will be outcry on eng-misc@ about it now it is in the news, and when it was first suggested that Search do this, someone will have found the plan and circulated it and it will be widely understood that this will be terrible for the brand of Google Search.
and then some exec will have written some nonsense email explaining how it was important as a cost saving measure and to secure "IP" for "pivot to AI" and that'll be the end of it.
it's extremely weird that HN posters assume Google employees aren't aware of things happening in the world, or don't predict the very obvious consequences of VP decisions.
I guess I'll have to buy the new Google TV Streamer because my previous Chromecast with Google TV 4K is now close to useless because of the lack of flash memory space after all the updates (despite it has a properly initialized USB drive connected via a powered USB-C hub, the most essential apps still require to be installed on the miniscule internal memory).
Why install apps? It's a Chromecast, just cast to it. I've been using Chromecasts as my primary vehicle on my TV for 8 years, and never needed to install any apps. It seems like it defeats the purpose of the main distinguishing characteristic.
I think on Google announcement of discontinuing the original Chromecast they mentioned that Smart TVs are ubiquitous now, so this kinda doesn't speak well for their own Android TV like Chromecast 4 and forward being not discontinued too some time soon.
I agree, and also know my own personal bias against this particular company and whatever extent I might go to boycott or avoid its products are ultimately inconsequential to their bottom line.
No. But caching takedowns is not the same at all as YouTube takedowns. It’s very very clear who owns what data and after the takedown the site owner can modify the robots.txt and move on.
but really, do you seriously think that people in companies do things for any reason rather than their own benefit? do you? nope. nyet. nahi. nada. coz everyone is that way.
My Pixel keeps getting worse. The only thing I can count on assistant for is setting a timer (as long as I don't interact with the phone before it takes a pause then says 'starting now', because if I don't wait then apparently I didn't actually want the timer I just requested and it doesn't get set). So, I guess it's 50% on the timer thing too.
It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway.
Even YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS of all things is on there and they supported that system for two years longer than Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn't have been possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app) as two different things, despite the link to the news of their death being in the same article and Google shutting them at the same time.[0]
It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1] the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were videos that were only accessible from that app.
Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google’s decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo and today it is Google-Baz.
It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative. Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different feature set.
_Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a release, which means that's the point in time it started working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it stopped working.
Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about literal opposites there.
And surely the most popular video service no longer being available on the second most popular handheld console released since the launch of that service surely justifies at least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers things made not available by the owners of said video service, especially since it was a standalone product.
My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017) but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless if Google Toolbar gets a spot for being killed in 2021, long past it having any relevance whatsoever, I don't doubt that YouTube 3DS would be guaranteed a spot no matter how long Google kept it on life support.
I don't know why this is your hill to die on, but there's not really any ambiguity that Google killed Youtube 3DS. They issued an update so that it stopped working[1]. New 3DS software updates were still being issued up until April 20, 2024, and new 3DS hardware was still being sold when Google killed Youtube for Nintendo 3DS in September 2019.
Obviously there are good reasons why they did it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong on this list
This a shame. It's really annoying getting a Google result snippet that contains your search phrase, but when you click the link is nowhere to be found in the content of the page (e.g. because sever rendered differently for you than the crawl agent).
Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.
I was thinking today that companies like google don't understand the implication of losing or discarding a couple percent of their customers per year every year.
The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are finishing it off.
I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward, it's not like the world will remain static once most of the human written websites have shuttered.
Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of the first damage to the search result quality that they started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used to be done manually years before.
I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's search engine requires there to be content for them to index and send people to in order for their service to be useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites want google to send them traffic.
LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they don't get enough traffic anymore.
There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".
Yup, mostly sponsored websites, thus killing the Internet. We have complained about this for at least a decade, we are tired too, thus moving to a better knowledge provider like the LLMs is a natural step.
A huge amount of links on HN are just the personal websites of some person expressing their views. Not infrequently these people show up in the comments to engage with people.
Bringing on HN specifically as an example is not serious.
Thinking LLMs are anyone's salvation in the fact of Dead Internet Theory has to most the most incomprehensible thing I've read on this site. Maybe ever.
Because there are clear symptoms of, for example, Dead Instagram and Dead Facebook with desperate algorithms serving pathetic LLM-generated sludge. The contagion spreads.
Truthfully, that says a lot more about you/your searches than it does about Google. I almost never have questions where LLMs can actually give me a good answer, whereas Google usually has something for me. I have to sift through the dross, but it's still there.
> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine
Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product...
EDIT:
Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0]
[0] https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...
>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product
WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.
There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.
[0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
No kidding:
Click a result's three dots menu. Underneath all the main call to action buttons (Visit, share, save) is a Wikipedia description of the site. Underneath that is a "More about this page" button. On this separate page is a description of the company, social media links, reviews, generic results for the company, and, finally, some 1100px down, "See previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine" in a 14px font: https://imgur.com/a/IMgVDpV
What's the ETA for this being removed due to lack of use...
That’s probably a good thing, people who really do research old archived stuff will dig and find it but others who casually click won’t bring archive.org to its knees
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It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).
I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting.
Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.
>> NDA
Non-disclosure agreement
I hope Google is NOT going to be a significant source of funding for the Internet Archive. Because I want to trust Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive to be unbiased.
Google likes to influence search results, hiding ones it doesn't like, and elevating those that the Company supports. Wayback Machine has been very reliable so far, I hope it stays that way.
Generally speaking, the Wayback Machine is not searchable in the fashion that Google is, there isn't a scale to put the thumb on.
(There are some tiny subsets which are rudimentarily full-text searchable; and some efforts to make domains findable. But nothing remotely like even Google 1.0 mapping URIs to organic terms.)
Which is really unfortunate because a lot of useful information is now essentially unfindable unless you know where it is. Maybe someone should start crawling and indexing the internet archive.
And no, the IA is already not an impartial archive: https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...
IA needs an alternative - an independent backup archive - more than it needs funding. Unless IA funding exceeds the entire US copyright lobbying industry there is always a chance they will cease to exist without enough notice to save the data somewhere else.
There is also the matter what IA will be able to archive. The the machine learning gold rush more and more site operators see dollar bills in front of them and are restricting who can crawl their content. Google is in a special position here because almost no one can affort not to be crawled by Google which is what made their cache especially valuable in addition to the IA.
Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save.
So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked.
I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
I disagree. I am happy the Internet Archive are fighting the draconian copy right laws that exist.
They aren't really fighting it, because they never picked a winnable battle.
Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.
"Pick a winnable fight" means the internet archive does not exist. Copyright in the US is very clear cut. There is no fight to "win" without changing the law.
That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.
The Internet Archive already pushed the boundaries and existed for long enough to make meaningful headway. They were winning the fight by picking the right battles and flying under the radar all the way up until they decided to completely overstep their mission and take on a fight that no one had any hope they would win.
Yeah, but no person who would worry about this would have made the IA in the first place. IA itself is a massive copyright suit waiting to happen.
I know, I know, if you were them and had bought bitcoin at $10 you would have sold at precisely the top at $70k per and neither before nor after.
I would agree, but IA did eventually add a mechanism for removing a site/copyrighted content entirely.
If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.
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Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.
Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.
You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.
Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.
I'll believe it when the pragmatic someone will replicate the Archive in all but ebook lending. Exactly zero of these wise men have done anything which is what I expect from those who speak who never do.
Slavish "the man in the arena" worship isn't particularly audacious. Unquestioning support for audacity for the sake of it speaks to lack of discernment. And to parrot a HN truism- a failure to account for survivor bias.
By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.
It's not worship. It's an observation. Those who talk, say they would stop at a precise stopping point, but they never start. Those who do, almost always overshoot this precise stopping point that the talkers refer to. An IA that has the precise stopping point is possible today. But zero people have made it. This is not unique.
In fact, I'll tell you what, you make it and I will dedicate my ArchiveTeam Warrior to your project instead for a year.
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You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Happy to comply even if the other party does not
But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well.
Obviously the law needs to be changed.
The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
We have to stop prioritizing it over everything else. You can't compete in the global playground if you have impossible to implement entitlement programs. Priority has to be new work not existing work and definitely not the work of dead people. We have countless similar schemes were people are to be rewarded for things done long ago. One can't pretend it isn't slowing everything down.
I wonder if reframing it as getting rid of hereditary wealth would make more people open to copyright reform.
Everyone just ignoring bad laws and contradicting them can remove laws too. But of course this is a niche topic that would never get such broad support.
A lot of people smoking weed is certainly a component for the prohibition to fail at some point.
Writing mails to legislative members isn't enough if you don't have any form of leverage.
Jury nullification is the real mechanism for We The People when we don't consent to be held to laws passed by They The Wealthy/Bribed Lawmakers
It requires that people refuse plea deals and demand jury trials, and that the jury is educated on what jury nullification is but when prosecutors can't get a conviction regardless of much evidence they have of guilt the laws will get changed or at least they stop being enforced.
AFAIU the jury doesn't have final say in civil trials so this would only work partially (copyright infringement can be both a civil dispute as well as a criminal matter).
They risked one of the greatest public goods in the history of humanity on a battle that everyone knew they would lose.
That's not an admirable underdog fight and it's not a glorious martyrdom, it's at best a naive slip up and at worst an ignoble organizational suicide attempt.
Change isn't going to happen because people recklessly throw themselves against the draconian laws and get annihilated by them—it will happen when people strategically set up a battle that they can win or persuade Congress to fix it.
Back over here in the real world, there is no possible way the IA will win this fight through the courts. It has to be dealt with by legislation.
So far no one has won the fight by legislation. Or even a single battle. In fact, copyright terms have only gotten worse over the years - FAR worse.
That doesn't contradict what I said.
Google Cache was useful because you could sometimes not find a term or keyword in the web site, but it would be in the cache. Or for sites that have gone offline, or no longer have the item. "It's still in the Google Cache!" you can't say that anymore.
I use Google less and less these days. What's the point when you can just ask an LLM, and it gives you an answer within seconds, with no ads? You can ask for references and links and it will give those to you too. I don't think I've ever been given a link to an SEO content farm, where as with Google search its the entire page. Google Search feels like Yahoo was (maybe even worse) right before it died and was replaced with Bing.
This still happens all the time.
* I search a keyword * I see a google result * I see the keyword IN THE PREVIEW on Google * I click on the link * No keyword
And this isn't hidden SEO spam stuff, it was literally removed. The cache doesn't match the live result.
No recourse.
Another annoying scenario is when the search result isn't the actual page/article/… itself, but only a snippet within a site's own (paginated) index.
At the time Google had indexed that page, the article preview you were looking for was maybe on page 5 of that index, but by the time you're arriving, it might have moved to page 11 because of all the additional content that got added since then.
With online shops it's even worse, because there items get both added and possibly removed again, plus the default ordering usually isn't strictly chronologically but some sort of popularity-based or whatever algorithm, so something that originally was indexed on page 5 of the catalogue might by now be on page 2 or on page 12 or it might have been dropped from the inventory altogether.
Even worse are the related articles/posts some sites like to show next to the main content. It really shows Google's lack of progress that they still haven't figured out a way to handle these cases better.
LLM… no ads…. *For now
*That you notice.
Assuming that the output isn't biased towards the operator's interests is naive.
I’m honestly less worried about ads that I am pay for preferential treatment
I used cache a lot, not just to view sites, but see the text versions of PDF and Word documents. RIP.
oh, wow, same! this comment just made me realize that some of my older projects will no longer work after this
I would presume Google still has all this data. They just will not let anyone else use it.
Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access?
Google wants it to be more difficult to notice rewrites? Journalists to often have found valuable information with it?
I feel like the internet archive has taken a lot of that sort of use off of Google.
Unrelated: Google should probably think about a sizable donation to the Internet archive.
Some kind of collaboration appears to be happening between the two https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...
They should donate all their saved data from Google Cache too.
> I would presume Google still has all this data. ...
Maybe - I guess that they must have served that "cached" content from DB-records that had it all saved directly (URL X has contents Y => basically a "mirror" of the terms that they indexed) => not having to store that "mirror" (only the search index) might save quite a lot of storage space (and I/O and CPU to decompress it, as users won't be requesting it anymore) => all in all that might save quite a lot of infrastructure costs $$$.
> Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access?
Maybe (if they decided to just get rid of the I/O related to the user requests), but on the other hand I don't know if previously any "Google-consumer" was ever able to perform mass-downloads of Google's "cached" data - could that be done without being banned by Google's webpage (or API)?
As I understand it, Google does a decent amount of rendering of a page before indexing; this a) allows it to index content loaded by JS and b) prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Perhaps Google's main way of storing a page no longer matches something that can be easily served as a cache page. This might be a way to remove a legacy copy of each page and reduce storage costs.
> prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users.
Google obviously hasn't cared about that for a long time.
Just with youtube, the surface area of these services is getting smaller and smaller and you get less and less. Too much optimization to the detriment of users. All the while search is still rooted in 90s concepts and only serves as a money making thing.
I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm pretty sure it's been years since I have seen a Google result which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.
One fewer reason to use Google search. Solid effort killing the money printer all around.
One more reason to not use Google search, I don't remember when it was the last time I used it, perhaps like twelve years ago.
Do any other versions provide cached versions of the pages they crawl? Far too many sites preform shinanigins based on geoip/ua.
Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and BraveSearch, please provide cache the pages you crawl and make them available to your users.
Yandex already does. Bing has cache as well.
Sadly, not knowing what used to be, erases history.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
Ah the memories! I remember in my starting years. I was migrating a WordPress to new server. The db backup got corrupted in the process. Google cache helped me restore the blog entries. Crazy days!
Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your RAG?
The answer could be to push users to their AI offerings, or possibly due to bots scraping up the cached data for their own AI models, where Google wasn't making a profit off providing the data. Most likely the feature wasn't used enough for them to care, and they couldn't find a way to monetize it to make it worth keeping around.
Probably yes. Or websites that google has made scraping deals with don't want a cache of their content to be publically available and the easiests thing to do was to just turn off the pulic cache completely.
Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons. I'm guessing it's still available internally, along with snapshots going far, far back in time.
> Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons
This could be due to site owners contacting the IA and requesting their site be permanently removed from the archive. It's not as easy as pressing a button, but it's not difficult to have your site removed.
I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. It's more likely that the blacklist is a voluntary opt-in thing...
> I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist.
They do: https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...
Many years ago Google Cache once saved a site I used to maintain/own, classic funny story, I accidentally deleted the production database when I was trying migrate it, but luckily all the data to recreate the latest posts (the most important for this japanese music-downloads-links WordPress site) was stored all in HTML attributes and some tags, so I created a script to scrap it all from Google Cache and recreated the DB as best as I could.
What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.
If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have always been able to remove their own content from Wayback Machine.
Archive.is seems even sketchier doesn’t it? Who is paying for all that? Total mystery. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just vanished one day. I feel like the solution is some version of local personal archive + zenodo plus those others.
Related discussion:
>Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 (2023)
That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
What was the article? Is this in Pak?
Could have been
On a unrelated note, could IA be charging companies training AI for access to an API with all thier data, or a enormous data dump?
Presumably historical context is quite useful for so e cases and if they can access new content like books etc then that'd be another benifit.
It is a win win for site owners who currently have everyone and thier dog crawling thier site at the moment.
Historical data, or before AI spam data is the most valuable. Makes sense to pull up the ladders from competitors.
Indeed, I would have done this yesterday in IA's shoes. Never have too big of a legal/servers fund.
I really don’t understand killing this useful feature. Between this and the search results being bad, I don’t have much of a reason to visit Google anymore.
> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found.
My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.
> will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found
About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to.
The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior.
Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway.
This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
And it doesn't have to be malicious either. Sometimes a result used to be on page 47 and is no longer on page 47. Or it was in the "related links" section and that changes multiple times a day.
Google allowed sites to disable caching since forever. They could also serve the full content to Google's bots, Google publishes their IP ranges.
That’s sad. I liked that feature a lot.
Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
> Google has now totally disabled the Google Cache from completely working.
What kind of word stuffing monstrosity is this.
Can someone ELI5 what google cache was and why it was important? Was it essentially a wayback machine alternative? People are upset about its removal; curious to understand why.
You could access a snapshot of the page that was taken when google was indexing it. It is helpful if the site content changed or was removed shortly after google indexed it. This often lead to wrong search result preview texts which you could still find in the cache. The internet archive has a different focus and maybe you won't find the missing information that google has indexed there.
Right, that was the real value of the feature: you got to see what Google saw or thought it saw. Plenty of sites serve different things to Googlebot and the Google cache could often help untangle that mess.
Do any other search engines have an equivalent feature?
IA is great, but doesn’t always crawl things like news articles as frequently as Google does.
Bing has it. The "Cached" link is in a little dropdown arrow menu behind the result's title.
Agreed that the Wayback Machine is not a replacement. There is a long delay before things show up there, if they do at all. If a page was going through technical difficulties and was unreachable, Google Cache was usually the only way to still access it.
I also don't understand where Google Guy gets this from:
"[…] it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved."
It can't only be me who feels that website reliability has dramatically crashed over the past decade or so, and it keeps getting worse.
Who's taking odds on when they shut down search?
Gmail is doing down first.
The question is, what is not dead in Google?
Ads of course.
The least they could do is financially and perhaps operationally support The Internet Archive instead
quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.
HTTP was not designed to resist a nuclear attack.
So easy to make some content disseapear.
This is a terrible news :( I know it was an option for web scraping and I used in once. I’m curious what is the real reason they took it down.
I have seen a push in the past year or so for saving storage across Google products. Caching the Internet takes a lot of storage. I suspect that's why they've removed it.
What were they thinking?!
What on earth is wrong with that company? This is just so incredibly brain dead.
I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.
Wasn't that NOARCHIVE?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...
I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems to be the case though because the cached versions would often contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use this trick to read any nikkei article.
Nah, it's not a Google thing although Google honored it. Here's a reference to the Internet Archive using it:
https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta...
I didn't mean to say that noarchive is only a google thing. My only point was that my assumption is that until now if Google didn't cache your site its contents would not be used for SEO.
I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.
You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.
https://archive.is often works for paywalled sites.
Another useful feature gone, I relied on the cache many times in the past 15 years (almost on a daily basis), it will be missed.
yeah true because when I am checking it on my site it is disabled. https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test
I hardly use Google search anymore. I think Google search wil also be dead soo .
For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere.
Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes.
Unfortunately, Google's time is over.
Can you help me understand how you use an LLM instead of google/bing? Did you have to set it up? Got a link to share? Thanks.
Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)"
The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99.
I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.
The real question is why they'd have to be aware.
It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant provider of email/office SaaS.
But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the institional momentum is just so huge that it's very likely Google simply doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little incentive to behave differently they may actually have an atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be important, even if they were aware of cultural momentum shifts and were willing/able to persuade others at Google to change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to learn?
I’ve been trying to make this point here on HN and elsewhere for quite a while now, but you said it so much more eloquently than me!
I see this as a variant of the tragedy of the commons: in this case it is the reputation and market share of Google Search.
Each individual at Google is incentivised to feed their own cow… err… career at the expense of the commons: Google’s reputation.
Inevitably this will destroy Google, but this will take many years of accumulated damage to build up to a catastrophic point.
It's a mistake that's made over and over again in tech. Back when Atari was printing money in the late 70s and early 80s the leadership and marketing people literally didn't know what to do that would help or hurt their business. Literally anything they did brought in more profits than they knew what to do with.
It caused them to make wild mistakes that jeopardized the long term viability of the company like milking their core product well after it had served its time in the market and neglecting, shutting down, or even warehousing everything else (sound familiar?).
It took some really forceful misunderstanding of their marketspace by clueless executives to finally bring Atari down and have it sold off for parts. And that's where Google's fate diverges from the historic lesson, Google won't die because its stuff its sales channels full of more hardware than they can sell (tying up every dollar in the company). Google will die because it's core product, ad placement, is become less valuable, causing the company to optimize trying to capture that main source of revenue -- which is realized in a total lack of strategy to build literally any other business.
They'd have to be aware because people have gotten wary of anything new from the company, due to the fears it'll be killed in a year or two. That's not a huge issue right now (since Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Docs, etc are huge), but it does make it more difficult for them to compete if the technological landscape changes and leaves them behind.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
It matters because the HN crowd maybe small when it comes consumer products , but is a dominant factor for cloud purchases.
Having been burnt too many times with Google products[1] I try not use their offerings on the cloud many decision makers are here who will worry about similar issues.
If Google wants to be serious about Cloud then they need to be serious about long term support.
Microsoft in the win 3 /9x days till even win 7 was exceptionally consistent about ABI support even adding specific behaviors to support a single binary to make sure upgrades just worked. That kind of culture was a key factor that made developers want to develop on their platforms
—-
[1] just this week having to start work on upcoming firebase dynamic link deprecation.
While google had given a long lead time and announced the sunsetting years ahead , I still don’t have to worry about similar issues on AWS nearly as often.
Google cache had what, 15 years of support, with no promises ever?
I think of all the google.products, that's pretty good.
Inbox still hurts though, but not as much as google music
It is hard to recommend Google Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614795
The problem is that the average number of years does not inspire confidence, and they make almost no promises anywhere.
Honestly, who is going to be comfortable staking their name on adopting Google's AI offerings? I have talked so many people out of wasting their effort supporting it simply by pointing to all the rug pulls Google has done.
Can you describe this more? Curious as I was looking at their offerings.
For starters there is this:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Was looking for something AI specific. Those are B2B services from their cloud.
I'm pretty sure people who used google's web cache comprised a tiny fraction of one percent of their entire user base, and this move doesn't even put the tiniest ding in their brand.
Mozilla via Firefox thought the same thing. They removed feature after feature, each feature only used by a tiny fraction of a percent.
But all those features were what drew users, power users especially. And users each had their own featured reasons to love Firefox.
Now look at them. Most used browser to nothing.
There are other reasons too, but what Firefox did was remove what was special about them.
> Most used browser to nothing.
Feel free to criticize Mozilla all you like, but this is a prime example of myopic tech-bubble thinking that is being decried elsewhere in this thread. Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome for free on what was then the most valuable web real estate in the world (the Google home page), then because they paid software installers to use dark patterns to automatically install Chrome and set it as the default browser without the user's consent, and then because they optimized all of Google's popular properties to work best in Chrome and only begrudgingly in other browsers, and then because they shipped it as the default browser on the OS that Google controls. There's not a single thing that Mozilla could have done to stop Chrome, short of making their own phone OS where they could ship Firefox as the default, which they did in fact attempt.
Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome
Yes, indeed. This may or may not have been wrong of Google, however this is also called "competition". And what did Mozilla do?
It flinched.
Many users loved Firefox, and disliked that Chrome had barely any ability to customize anything when released. It was literally years before you could change even the most basic things about the interface. When released, almost nothing could be configured about it, and it was a far cry from Firefox's ability to give the user what they wanted.
Firefox's response to Chrome's minor speed improvements? Was to literally begin a campaign to become the enemy. Firefox devs worked diligently to make Firefox a second rate clone of Chrome. They removed features, configuration, the ability to modify the interface, and more.
Mozilla could have so easily kept all that configurability, its strong point, its unique factor, but instead panicked. And in doing so it rendered itself incapable of competing on any footing.
Put another way, yes Google had vast resources. Yet this is precisely why you never compete on the same footing as them. You instead compete on what they do not have.
And that was the ability to theme Firefox, to configure it as you wanted, to turn off features you did not want, and more. Chrome had none of this initially. And Google is literally famous for, and incapable of listening to users. They're not built for it. Mozilla was.
And they threw all those strengths away, the only way they could compete with Chrome.
So yes, there were things they could have done. And yes, endless people told them that in bug reports, in emails to them, and more. If anyone's thinking here is myopic (great personal attack, btw), it was Mozilla's.
I do agree that perspective is more accurate; Chrome was always going to be huge with a combination of Google's development effort and advertising. However Mozilla's leadership have done an unimpressive job. They took a large amount of money from Google, decided that their vision of how the internet should work was identical to Google's, then converged Firefox to being an inferior Chrome clone. Brave does a better job of articulating a different vision of the web than Firefox and it is a Chrome fork; the situation is a bit ridiculous [0, 1]. And Brave's crypto scheme, while maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, is a radical re-imagination of how the web could be commercialised. So there is clearly room to imagine an internet other than the one Google wants where everyone has Google Ads.
So yes, Google was going to win the fight Mozilla picked, but Mozilla picked a losing strategy.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
[1] https://brave.com/compare/chrome-vs-brave/
That's just pure copium. Sure, google's tactics helped speed things along but remember that Firefox was originally able to gain marketshare against a browser that didn't even need to pull those tricks because it was already preinstalled on every PC.
Death by thousand paper cuts in action.
I love Firefox (fork) it is my only browser but you can see the long term trend and I do wonder if it will even be a thing in a decades time. Unless there is a sudden shift towards it, is will eventually be relegated to the last of the most devoted geeks as we watch it wither away at the hands of the tech giants running the net.
A big thing was when they cut the Servo team that was when I knew they had sort of given up on trying to push forward but merely follow.
The saddest day will be when Firefox switches to a blink engine
I had not thought of that. That is probably very likely. They can keep their public mantra of "privacy" to keep people coming to them but without the burden of tech development. Higher ups like that equation.
It is probably inevitable, I mean if even Microsoft couldnt fight off Googles browser dominance, what hope does Mozilla have long term.
I am hoping that Mozilla goes down that route. It might be the kick needed to get another more reponsible party to take over the stewardship of Gecko and the browser built upon it.
Exactly this.
It was a fairly hidden piece of functionality that a tiny proportion of people ever used -- of course, a higher proportion of HN users, but still.
Their brand is unchanged.
Not just HN. In my autocracy every housewife knew about Google cache — it was the easiest way to read information the government doesn't want you to read, and it was free and always available unlike many blocked VPNs (and what shady proxy companies call "VPNs").
I wonder if this is the reason Google killed the product? I.e., pressure from autocratic regimes so that they can control information better.
It adds up over time. I used and liked Google domains for a bunch of websites, and was disappointed when that was axed and all my domains moved to squarespace (and have since transferred them all out). I used the Google podcast app on my phone, and that was killed and replaced by YouTube music which is a horrible replacement.
I used to buy in heavily to the Google ecosystem and trust it as a pretty solid go to option for anything they offered, now I'd be really hesitant to use it for anything critical. I have even been wondering if my longstanding gmail email address will someday be a liability.
Those two examples were probably smaller services but had their effects on different populations. When you add up all the things that have been ended by Google it can really contribute to their overall brand image. Some things can trickle down from more technical users to less technical. I think chrome was first adopted by a highly tech literate population before breaking into the mainstream, and if that population starts to mistrust Google it could hurt them in the long run.
I think there has been a pretty major shift in Google culture and product strategy and I'm not a fan of it.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
It became apparent they are a zombie company once I realized I no longer put any brainspace into learning new functionality/tools Google offered. They are a corporation living off the corpse of who they have been. Total zombie company that doesn't realize it's dead yet.
What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life? Instead of adding Google Quickshare to share files from my PC to Android I use Microsoft's Phone Link. That is the first time in my life I've picked a Microsoft product over a Google one. It also just works better and doesn't require I have bluetooth enabled on both devices.
> What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life?
Gemini. Maybe you prefer ChatGPT, but either way the product category is a huge improvement to daily life for a lot of people. And transformers were invented at Google.
And Waymo is on its way to being huge. Might eventually make Google more money than everything it's done before.
As far as I can tell, innovation seems alive and well at Google. But a lot of their product categories are simply "mature" by now -- you're not going to see some wild transformation of YouTube, or Docs and Drive, or Android. Same as you're not seeing some wild reinvention of Apple Music, or iCloud, or iOS.
I tried Gemini in Google assistant for 5 minutes. It is not hyperbole to say it completely broke every feature I used assistant for and I reverted back instantly.
I am never getting into a Google powered vehicle. They aren't 2000s genius Google, they are 2024 'We're getting rid of Google Cache' Google that prioritizes a buck over good tech. I'm not trusting that mindset with my life.
You're complaining about the Assistant integration, not stand-alone Gemini.
And you still won't get into a Waymo when extensive statistics prove they're far safer than a human driver?
Yes. They are the new Oracle. And like Oracle, they won't care how much their brand stinks like a fish market on a hot summer's day because they'll still be raking in enough cash not to care.
I recently started with YouTubeTV, and its great. And Waymo is coming to my town soon. So I agree, lots of abandoned products, but still quite a few good ones.
I have an original Chromecast and it still works, though pairing it with a new TV is a bit of a pain.
The new Google TV is more like a smart TV without the TV. It has apps you install. It's much more complex and not the same thing at all. I was disappointed.
But then again every company discontinues products. I don't see that as a breach of trust. It's making up a promise they never made and criticizing them for it.
Lucky you.
I've got a couple nest protects that need to be put into a shallow grave.
They've kinda mucked up the rest of the nest ecosystem.
A pox on google.
I've not been so lucky. Google went into partnership with Asus years ago and released the Nexus player, which I had. An expensive streaming player that within a year bricked itself due to Google's update. Many people were upset and when asked for support on the official forums, Google said it was in Asus' hands and of course Asus said the same of Google. I checked for updates at least a year thereafter but there was no fix, the thing was hard-bricked and hundreds of people had useless hockey pucks. Never again, Google.
Aww man, I worked on the chromecast SoC. It was a... difficult product. If there was a more perfect example of a product being killed by penny pinching, I can't think of one. It just didn't have enough flash for anything but a super cut down android. We had to drop multilib - the SoC and everything supported 64bit, just there wasn't enough space for the libraries. And the cheapest, bargin-basement flash as well - causing so many to be bricked trying to update. Plus 1gb ram, when even entry level phones were shipping with 2gb - just a couple of 4k framebuffers and the video decode reference frames meant there was pretty much nothing left for the apps themselves. So 1080p was it's limit despite having a capable video decoder and output.
And for ages afterwards they would use it as a reference device for google TV and testing for play store certification - just as they were pushing 64-bit only as a valid app path. So many things were only missing from the google tv play store for years afterwards because they just wouldn't function on those things.
I think you can just ignore the apps and cast like you’re used to, if you don’t care about the extra functionality.
(But in that case, I don’t see why you bought one in the first place.)
Yes, casting from your phone still works. However, it requires a Google login to set up and automatically downloads a bunch of apps you probably don't want if all you care about is playing movies and YouTube videos from your phone. I suppose you could create an account just for this, but you really shouldn't need an account at all.
It was a gift for a relative: a "Chromecast with Google TV." I didn't know what it really was when I bought it. Taking "Chromecast" out of the name makes sense.
The original concept was great, but I guess it doesn't sell anymore?
The original concept was great for some things, sure.
I bought an OG Chromecast over a decade ago. It was a one-trick pony: Push "cast" button on pocket computer, and whatever I was doing there would show up on the BFT.
Which is great, you know, for a person who lives alone and never has visitors: One can select an item from the slick interface provided by the service they subscribe to on their amazing personal computing device and it appears magically on the big screen. The control buttons are there on the pocket computer, too. It Just Works.
However, it is an awful experience for someone who wishes to watch a film together with others: My personal pocket computer is not really set up to be shared with others (and the live screencast function of Chromecast, while functional, has really high latency for interactive tasks).
And if someone else wants to pick something to watch using their own personal pocket computer, then they can of course do so -- but theirs is also not meant to be a shared experience, and they won't be able to use the services that I pay to use in my home.
So fine. A film is selected, however that is done, and it is playing. But it's time to pause it so someone can use the bathroom. Do I use my phone for my Chromecast for the movie my friend picked on their phone? I already had to hide the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Or do I have my friend fumble around with this potentially-unfamiliar interface on their own (locked) pocket computer to pause it? What if they stepped away? Do I find the Home app on my own pocket computer, open it, find the devices page, find the appropriate Chromecast device, and then finally fucking pause it? (Fuck you. I just want to go take a fucking piss.)
Back then, it was a much better experience in my household to use a PS3 for streaming: It had a regular remote control that -- as a design intent -- anyone could pick up and operate. Browsing possible selections was done on the BFT that was visible to all interested parties. My roommate didn't get a notification on their phone that encouraged them fuck with me from a different area of the house. It was a much better experience for those who didn't live a life of absolute solitude.
Today, it's still that way -- except nowadays I have [what is sometimes referred to as] a GCWGTV. It can behave like an OG Chromecast (what UI???), or it can behave like a human-centric streaming device with its own GUI and dedicated physical remote control that anyone can pick up and use, browsing Netflix or Plex or whatever in a manner very similar to what we were doing on a PS3 back in the day.
This works fine.
> I already hid the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Honestly that sounds far more like your roommate being an ass than some failure of the technology. If you had to tape over the IR sensor because your roommate kept blasting the IR power off signal for your TV, would you also blame the IR sensor?
Either way, my TV remotes which support CEC that have play/pause buttons on them can play/pause content on my OG chromecast.
When an IR remote starts putting notifications on any and every phone that happens to be on the network that let them very easily fuck up my streaming experience, then it may be possible to start drawing parallels. Until then, they're very different concepts.
(And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.)
Your roommate didn't even have to be on the same network to mess with the IR receiver. They just didn't think of it I guess.
https://www.tvbgone.com/
I'd still say its 99% having a shitty roommate. I don't know why you'd excuse their shit behavior on having a button to do it.
> And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.
Eh. I've had a few dozen AV setups of "moderate" complexity (multiple game consoles/streaming boxes, AV receiver, BD player, TV) and never really had bad experiences. Often things just work when I've turned them on. And honestly most of the time with things running my OG Chromecasts its the only actual device on the setup (a stand-alone TV mounted someplace like in the garage or kitchen or patio).
Did the TV B Gone manifest itself from nothing and present that manifestation on my asshole roommate's personal pocket computer with zero action on their part?
No?
Then we're done here.
Mine worked great. Had Chromecasts in every room and a few Google Home minis. Anyone in the house could just say "Hey Google, play [WhatEverTheFuckTheyWant] from [AnyStreamingServiceIHave] on [TheTVOfTheirChoice]" it really was great, but for some reason it stopped working most of the time about 18 months and has continually degraded.
I can see how that works for you, but it’s a lot simpler for us. If I picked the movie then I pause it when someone asks. If my wife picked the movie then she pauses it.
With a Real Remote Control (that nobody owns except for the coffee table that nobody owns): Anyone involved in a group viewing can just push the pause button when that is useful for one or more members of that group.
Nobody's locked-down personal pocket computer needs to be involved at all for this most mundane task.
Simplicity.
At home, it just pops up for everyone on the local network so anyone can do it. Works nicely for us to be honest. I quite like it. And the remote works too. Overall, I’m quite happy with this stuff.
The only thing is that if you set up with all HomePods you can have your TV audio go to them too in stereo. Very cool. And Google doesn’t have that feature.
Why not both?
Can my neighbor not stop by and watch some TV with me and have the ability to pause it?
They can. It’ll pop up on their phone if they’re on the network or they can use the remote. I do it all the time myself because I set my phone aside.
So now I need my neighbor to be on my network in order let them pause the TV while they're over?
I might as well publish the SSID and passphrase on a billboard, or just go full Bruce Schneier and leave it open for all.
(Or.... You know, a real remote! With real buttons!)
The remote does work. This is an added convenience. To be clear, the remote continues to work. At no point does the remote stop working. If you use your phone to cast, the neighbour can still use the remote to pause. If you don't give the neighbour the SSID, he can still use the remote. Your neighbour does not need to be on your network. If he's on your network the remote and his phone will work. If he's off your network, the remote will work. The remote will not stop working. Hope that clarifies.
Yes, I know. I [can] have both.
The original argument was in favor of the OG Chromecast's method, wherein: There is no dedicated remote laying around that anyone can pick up and unambiguously make work.
It is good to have options.
(And modern Google-produced streaming devices, whether they are good or bad, do provide options.)
I have several Chromecasts in my TVs. Keeping them paired with mobile devices has become a nightmare. They frequently disconnect, often immediately after queuing videos. They never used to behave this way
The silver lining is that I have been finding some better alternatives to both Chromecast and YouTube. I have some Amazon Firesticks with Kodi installed that are pointed at my media-filled NAS, including videos I fetched previously with yt-dlp
I am also considering moving everything over to something like Intel PC sticks and possibly running Kodi off of those eventually. Then I can have all of the smart features I need without any ads or without any of the devices obsoleting themselves beyond my control
I've run Kodi for a while, raspberry pis and fire sticks mostly. Right now the best setup I have is on old Chromeboxes running libreelec or retroelec if I want gaming. It's pretty great. Chromebox G1 is like max $50 or less. They are way faster than any non X86 based hardware I've tried. The only downside is the lack of HDMI-CEC so I have to use either my phone, a gaming controller or some sort of Bluetooth remote to control it. I have installed Bliss OS on some Chromeboxes and it works well but haven't tried running Kodi on top of it. Might work well if I need access to any specific apps.
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
Their finance bros don't care about anything they can't measure. Mission accomplished as far as they're concerned.
Before Stadia came out, I specifically warned people not to get invested in it because Google will just shut it down in 2 years, and all their games and save files will be gone forever. I was dead right, and as far as I'm concerned that's the final nail in the coffin for trusting anything Google makes. Anything that isn't a major core product will be abandoned immediately, it's just not worth the risk.
Unfortunately my TV is built on the Google TV OS, which probably means all smart features will be unusable in six months.
I'm aware of Google's history of shutting down services... but...
> And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
Will you have no trouble buying a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick though?
Those are also paper weights once the company decides to stop supporting them - and I'm not aware of any consumer electronics that allows you to install your own software on it.
Seems like a strange swipe at Google, even though your complaints apply to all of these devices regardless of brand.
For what it's worth - Google's latest phones, Pixel 9, boast 7 years of updates and support.
I think GP's point was specifically Google's famous history of starting projects and then shutting them down within a few years. Old Rokus still work. My Roku 3600 is eight years old.
My old Roku is now so sluggish and slow, it's a paper weight and I had to buy a new one.
All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable. GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite updates forever? Zero.
Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name. None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google kills things all the time" complaint.
If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's about legitimate things.
My Chromecast is 11 years old and still works fine. Sometimes YouTube thinks it can try playing back the higher bitrate 4k version of a video and it'll get choppy but I've never had issues with 1080p content.
My older Roku 2 is effectively unusable as most apps are just outrageously sluggish and videos often crash loading.
So do old Chromecast's.
The "Google Chromecast with Android TV" was a stick that was sold for $25, and it runs full Android TV. Google would have to abandon Android TV before it would be bricked.
They were sold as cable box replacements, running the YouTube TV app, rather than their ability to "cast" a phone screen to a TV.
It's called "Chromecast with Google TV" and it wasn't $25 until they made the cheaper version that doesn't do 4k.
Afaik Google TV is to Android TV what Pixel OS is to Android. Both the "Chromecast with Google TV" and the new "Google TV Streamer" are technically running "full Android TV".
Also they were sold mainly as a Roku/Fire stick competitor. Maybe they marketed it alongside YouTube TV but also there's a dedicated Netflix button on the remote.
Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia Shield. Really nice for travel.
> I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
You can install LineageOS on it today.
If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
yes, of course. there will be outcry on eng-misc@ about it now it is in the news, and when it was first suggested that Search do this, someone will have found the plan and circulated it and it will be widely understood that this will be terrible for the brand of Google Search.
and then some exec will have written some nonsense email explaining how it was important as a cost saving measure and to secure "IP" for "pivot to AI" and that'll be the end of it.
it's extremely weird that HN posters assume Google employees aren't aware of things happening in the world, or don't predict the very obvious consequences of VP decisions.
I guess I'll have to buy the new Google TV Streamer because my previous Chromecast with Google TV 4K is now close to useless because of the lack of flash memory space after all the updates (despite it has a properly initialized USB drive connected via a powered USB-C hub, the most essential apps still require to be installed on the miniscule internal memory).
Why install apps? It's a Chromecast, just cast to it. I've been using Chromecasts as my primary vehicle on my TV for 8 years, and never needed to install any apps. It seems like it defeats the purpose of the main distinguishing characteristic.
I use it mostly for the "Google TV" part, not for the "Chromecast" part.
I think on Google announcement of discontinuing the original Chromecast they mentioned that Smart TVs are ubiquitous now, so this kinda doesn't speak well for their own Android TV like Chromecast 4 and forward being not discontinued too some time soon.
I agree, and also know my own personal bias against this particular company and whatever extent I might go to boycott or avoid its products are ultimately inconsequential to their bottom line.
My guess is it was a pain keeping up with the takedown requests.
Treat it like you do customer support and automate it. Or is that not allowed?
Do you actually want automated take-downs? Isn't that what people already complain the most about on YouTube?
No. But caching takedowns is not the same at all as YouTube takedowns. It’s very very clear who owns what data and after the takedown the site owner can modify the robots.txt and move on.
So yes, takedowns here are fine.
It’s a cache. Relatively speaking, who cares
It’s a cache; it was going to expire after a TTL anyway.
The amount of people using the feature was probably a rounding error for them. This is probably true for all the services they kill.
Removing the link to view cached content will do that.
s/people using the feature/profit left to extract/g
bro, do yourself a favor, and go meditate in the google graveyard.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
for how to do it, see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati
make sure to read it fully, including all the links, recursively.
and
https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?t=17516&start=20
https://damsara.org/interesting-new-findings/solitary-night-...
just kidding.
but really, do you seriously think that people in companies do things for any reason rather than their own benefit? do you? nope. nyet. nahi. nada. coz everyone is that way.
I don't buy google devices anymore except for Pixel phones. Everything else tends to be disappointing over time.
My Pixel keeps getting worse. The only thing I can count on assistant for is setting a timer (as long as I don't interact with the phone before it takes a pause then says 'starting now', because if I don't wait then apparently I didn't actually want the timer I just requested and it doesn't get set). So, I guess it's 50% on the timer thing too.
Enshittification
I guess that's another one to add to the list:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway.
Even YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS of all things is on there and they supported that system for two years longer than Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn't have been possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's also killed.
We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but dead is dead.
Agreed. Some other examples:
It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app) as two different things, despite the link to the news of their death being in the same article and Google shutting them at the same time.[0]
It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1] the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were videos that were only accessible from that app.
[0] https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/
[1] https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-a...
[2] https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/
Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google’s decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo and today it is Google-Baz.
It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative. Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different feature set.
_Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a release, which means that's the point in time it started working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it stopped working.
Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about literal opposites there.
And surely the most popular video service no longer being available on the second most popular handheld console released since the launch of that service surely justifies at least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers things made not available by the owners of said video service, especially since it was a standalone product.
My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017) but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless if Google Toolbar gets a spot for being killed in 2021, long past it having any relevance whatsoever, I don't doubt that YouTube 3DS would be guaranteed a spot no matter how long Google kept it on life support.
I don't know why this is your hill to die on, but there's not really any ambiguity that Google killed Youtube 3DS. They issued an update so that it stopped working[1]. New 3DS software updates were still being issued up until April 20, 2024, and new 3DS hardware was still being sold when Google killed Youtube for Nintendo 3DS in September 2019.
Obviously there are good reasons why they did it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong on this list
[1] https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html
Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one gone, another one bites the dust.
[dead]
This a shame. It's really annoying getting a Google result snippet that contains your search phrase, but when you click the link is nowhere to be found in the content of the page (e.g. because sever rendered differently for you than the crawl agent).
Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.
[dead]
What was it?
Google would cache older versions of pages that it had crawled, and you were able to access this cache.
I'm pretty sure that Google's main business is cancelling products. Things like search and ads are just side gigs.
I was thinking today that companies like google don't understand the implication of losing or discarding a couple percent of their customers per year every year.
Nowadays my browser's home page is one of the LLMs. It's easier to get knowledge with an AI than the dead Internet to which Google contributed.
The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are finishing it off.
I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward, it's not like the world will remain static once most of the human written websites have shuttered.
Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of the first damage to the search result quality that they started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used to be done manually years before.
I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's search engine requires there to be content for them to index and send people to in order for their service to be useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites want google to send them traffic.
LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they don't get enough traffic anymore.
There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".
> send traffic to websites
Yup, mostly sponsored websites, thus killing the Internet. We have complained about this for at least a decade, we are tired too, thus moving to a better knowledge provider like the LLMs is a natural step.
A huge amount of links on HN are just the personal websites of some person expressing their views. Not infrequently these people show up in the comments to engage with people.
Bringing on HN specifically as an example is not serious.
Thinking LLMs are anyone's salvation in the fact of Dead Internet Theory has to most the most incomprehensible thing I've read on this site. Maybe ever.
Why?
Because there are clear symptoms of, for example, Dead Instagram and Dead Facebook with desperate algorithms serving pathetic LLM-generated sludge. The contagion spreads.
So your LLM has an up to date cache of roughly all web pages in the world?
Given that the answer is inevitably going to be "no", why do you think this generic complaint is in any way relevant to the article?
To all, no. A summarized cache of the most important knowledge, yes!
Truthfully, that says a lot more about you/your searches than it does about Google. I almost never have questions where LLMs can actually give me a good answer, whereas Google usually has something for me. I have to sift through the dross, but it's still there.
They say books are even better, how big your books are is telling something about anyone?
Probably a lot fewer ads as well.
...FOR NOW
If you think Alexa's "by the way" is bad..