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Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018
- tbrowbdidnso 10y agoWhat? Why? You can still do the same search by typing site:URL in Google so it's literally zero investment by them to keep it workinf. And these people were paying for it. I can't help think this has something to do with their AMP articles. They don't want you to leave google, ever
- chipperyman573 10y agoPaying gets you white-label branding and no ads.
- angry-hacker 10y agoYou can hide their ads with css. Probably against their tos, but I haven't been busted for doing it in 2yrs.
- pedalpete 10y agoI doubt it has anything to do with them not wanting you to leave google, more that there isn't anything in it for them. I suspect they thought at one point that this would be a freemium product and people would upgrade to the white-label version, but maybe they weren't, or not enough. Now, if somebody wants google on their site, they have to pay google, or force visitors to go to google.com, where google will show them ads.
- ptrptr 10y agoWhy? According to pricing page at least 100 USD a year for basic product, that's why.
- century19 10y agoI believe that this Enterprise Search can be used for pages that are not freely available on the Internet. I've seen it used on portals where you have to be logged in to access the content.
- seanp2k2 10y agoNot sure how much it overlaps with https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html or what the future for GSA is, given Google's track record for discontinuing products.
- texec 10y agoGSA is already discontinued: http://fortune.com/2016/02/04/google-ends-search-appliance/ http://fortune.com/2016/02/04/google-ends-search-appliance/
- ipsum2 10y agoNote that Google custom site search is still available: https://cse.google.com/cse https://cse.google.com/cse The main difference seems to be that enterprise has custom branding and is ad-free.
- mc32 10y agoSince they pushed Excite out of this business, who will take up the slack?
- ojosilva 10y agoFrom the top of my head, I'd say this is a great opportunity for Algolia.
- mc32 10y agoYep, that's a good opportunity for them, for sure. I'd start calling up universities and get a foot in for exposure, list them as enterprise clients, etc.
- tbarbugli 10y agoGoogle owns this and they are giving it up, why? My guess is they dont make enough money this way (with search as a service). That is probably just a long term concern but an important one.
- ethana 10y agoStucked in time: http://www.excite.com/ http://www.excite.com/
- t_prakash 10y agoand yet it has a ranking of 8,689 with huge traffic uptick since Jan 17 as per Alexa today .... does that mean people still use it regularly?
- 10y ago
- Animats 10y agoIt's not ad-supported, so Google has to actually sell the service and collect money from large numbers of small users. Google is not good at that.
- avar 10y agoThey manage that with Google Music, recurring Play store payments etc.
- Groxx 10y agoWith a couple orders of magnitude more users, yes. Willing to pay $100/year to remove branding on a search engine you add to your website is far, far less common than "willing to pay to listen to music".
- Vintila 10y agoand G Suite (formally Google Apps for Business)
- Yrlec 10y agoGiven the big mess they had when Google Drive migrated to Google Play subscriptions I wouldn't exactly say that they're good at it. http://imgur.com/a/gzkZ5 http://imgur.com/a/gzkZ5
- dredmorbius 10y ago
- Mayzie 10y agoOf course, another product shut down by Google.
- allenz 10y agoCustom search has large maintenance costs--a lot of effort which really isn't interesting for any developer to work on. And apparently companies aren't willing to pay enough to overcome that. I don't think Google has any obligation not to shut down products.
- gldalmaso 10y agoThey have no obligation, but it hurts adoption of their other products since it has happened often. They should be mindful of that trend since they already have gotten a bad rep because of it. At some point in the future, when they really need it, few people will jump on their new band wagon.
- brynjolf 10y agoAnd we have no obligation to expect their next product to stay alive long enough for us to use it properly.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoFor a brief moment I've read "Google shutting 'Down Side Search'".
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoLOL -4 karma on that one.
- orik 10y agowow - shocking; I wonder if anyone will move into this space instead. hoping for duck duck go or a new startup.
- dest 10y agoSo, more room for Algolia et al?
- ekiara 10y agoI read this and assumed it was just an early April Fools Gag. Actually, I'm still not convinced that it isn't linked to April Fools.
- kantharia 10y agoI also think this is some kind-of April Fool Joke
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- timvdalen 10y agoWhere is the shut-down message? I just get the pricing page for GSS in Dutch. EDIT: I was also able to create a new site search engine.
- pmiller2 10y agoI see it on the English site. I bet if you set your language to English, it would show up.
- jwilk 10y agoI have only English in Accept-Language, but Google still displays the page in Polish. Yay. :-|
- galeksic 10y ago> Where is the shut-down message? Try English version of that page: https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html?hl=en https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html?hl=en > EDIT: I was also able to create a new site search engine. The shut-down message says "On April 1, 2017, Google will discontinue sales of the Google Site Search".
- tokenizerrr 10y agoAmusing how they don't feel the need to inform non-english people.
- i336_ 10y agoThat message is possibly in a to-be-translated queue. For something like this.... maybe not all languages, but just the ones that analytics detect significant traffic from.
- tokenizerrr 10y agoI checked Dutch, German and French. Nothing.
- Zarkonnen 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/
- kasparsklavins 10y agoPay per DNS lookup? There's a SaaS somewhere in there.
- grega_g 10y agoMore like IaaS
- alecco 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
- donum 10y agoThat's a pitty for people like me who are using it. Although you have to say the product had its flaws on larger scales.
- johnchristopher 10y agoHow does it relate to google search console ? I don't understand the relationship or the difference between both (unless there are the same ?).
- elena_brz 10y agoGoogle Search Console is Google Webmasters Tool, it's a different thing.
- mitola 10y agoThis actually is making me fairly frustrating. Me and my team were literally just finishing the GSS integration and all of the sudden the only option google is suggesting is "will automatically convert to Custom Search Engine (CSE). Custom Search Engine is an ads-supported product "
- saycheese 10y agoPer the Google's statement: "On April 1, 2017, Google will discontinue sales of the Google Site Search. All new purchases and renewals must take place before this date. The product will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018." If I were you and you really had already finished the Google Search dev work you referenced, I would pay for service as soon as possible for the duration up until April 1, 2018. Use the service, see how user users are really using it, then use what you've learned to plan for the future.
- mitola 10y agoThank a lot for your suggestion :) We will do that as soon as possible.
- jpkeisala 10y agoThey shut down Google Mini few years ago. I never really understood why would they do that. Looks like they are on the route to shut down all enterprise services.
- nodesocket 10y agoWhat are some competitors to site search?
- balsamiq 10y agoWe've been using https://swiftype.com/site-search https://swiftype.com/site-search for a couple of years. It's great.
- nodesocket 10y agoPricing starts at $299/mo. Bit steep if you're a smaller company.
- elena_brz 10y agoThey dropped the free plan some time ago, although if using their WP plugin on a wordpress site, you can still make use of it. I also found SearchIQ but never used it to be honest, so I can't really tell. Algolia is quite powerful too.
- ayanb 10y agoAlgolia, SwiftType, sooqr.com, Hawk Search (for ecommerce stores), Inbenta. HN and ProductHunt runs on Algolia. Edit - some more details here: https://siftery.com/categories/api-and-developer-tools/search-tools https://siftery.com/categories/api-and-developer-tools/searc...
- Mayzie 10y agoI've used and am impressed with Sajari: https://www.sajari.com/ https://www.sajari.com/
- ungzd 10y agoPostgresql's tsvectors and GIN, Elasticsearch.
- majewsky 10y ago
- Fej 10y agoI wonder if it would be worth the money for Google to keep services like this one running, just so that people (especially enterprise customers) don't lose faith in Google's competency with regard to long-term product support. Although if you ask around here, you'd probably not find much faith for them to save.
- d0vs 10y agoI honestly don't think people outside the HN echo chamber care that much.
- ancarda 10y agoProblem is, people on HN are making decisions and building tools and startups. If everyone loses faith in Google, we'll stop using their platforms and tools which translates to loss of money. The only example I can give is at my day job, I built a backup system that uses Azure blob storage because I actually trust Microsoft more than Google. I wonder how many other people have a "anyone but Google" approach? It's not just cancelling services, it's the churn in APIs; they seem to be less stable than products from almost any other company.
- d_theorist 10y agoGoogle clearly just doesn't have the enterprise-support mindset in their DNA in the way that companies like Microsoft do. Google's core business is search and ads. Everything else is either an afterthought or a dalliance, and it shows.
- threepipeproblm 10y agoI already avoid new Google products because of this, as I am sure many of you do. While I've embraced Golang somewhat, it took me a few extra months of research and thought before doing that.
- bddenhartog 10y agoI can't wait for Rust to gain more traction, and be usable on the web. IMHO it's a much more pleasant language to work with.
- jpdus 10y agoOn the German page I get when following this link, there is still no shutdown notice visible but only the "normal" marketing page for Site Search (+pricing). Does the shutdown only affect US customers or does Google fail to communicate this internationally?
- adamcharnock 10y agoHum, I'm seeing the notice in the UK.
- aembleton 10y agoThis could be a good opportunity for DuckDuckGo to make some money and improve awareness of their brand.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Malic 10y agoNo kidding! I would totally give such a service a serious look for future client work.
- 0mp 10y agoIt's happening right now: https://duckduckgo.com/search_box https://duckduckgo.com/search_box
- Malic 10y agoThat's not quite what I'm looking for - I need an API. I need to maintain client branding on site without mentioning the search service provider - and I would expect to be billed for that. The conversion here at HN on this topic has been useful in pointing out such services that I didn't know about, for which I am thankful!
- swang 10y agothis is why i'm not completely 100% with google photos. i'm ready to spend the monthly fees to store all my pictures in its original resolution, use google photos to manage/search my photos. except i don't want to commit to using it and then finding out google doesn't want to support it and just dumps it. same thing with google voice. i use it but i've never committed to using it as my main phone number. maybe it's a catch-22, but maybe google should stop sunsetting so many products so as to cause people to have no faith in their products. pretty much the only untouchable thing is gmail since the negative press for that would probably end google to the general public.
- riprowan 10y agoI'm right there with you. Long term Google product user here (Android, Fi, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Etc) and I'm winding it all down, except gmail which will remain my spam-mailbox.
- tiatia 10y agoGmail is shit. Gmail is Email Extraordinaire but if something goes wrong and you lose access, good luck gaining it back. Try to call somebody. This, and all the privacy issues.
- Eridrus 10y agoAccount recovery is a shitshow everywhere, either it's almost useless or it's a huge vulnerability with no good middle ground I've seen. For a moment I thought this would be a good use case for federated authentication, but who would you even trust to run that securely?
- tiatia 10y agoHow about a company that you pay and that you can call? (and maybe submit a passport copy if need be or something) They sell email for your own domain (you can also buy a domain there): https://www.infomaniak.com/en https://www.infomaniak.com/en Bonus: Based in Switzerland, no EU or US jurisdiction.
- ashishkoujalgi 10y agoApril fool?
- rndstr 10y agoDifferences between GSS and CSE: https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4541888?hl=en https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4541888?hl=en As someone who just finished moving a custom search result site implementation from GSA (discontinued) to GSS this is highly outrageous. No access to the XML/JSON API is a showstopper.
- DanBlake 10y agoShit, I use this for image search. Basically we let users submit the title of items they own (for everydaycarry.com), we do a google image search for that title and display back the top 5 results from googles image search to the user, letting them click on the appropriate product. We then link that product to the google image source URL. Anyone know of a alternative product that would let this keep happening? When we implemented this originally, I did not find any competing options from either Microsoft, Amazon or Yahoo- That was 2 years ago though, so things may have changed for image search API's.
- skzo 10y agoI think you'll still be able to do: https://www.google.pt/search?q=knives+site:http://everydaycarry.com&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=745&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVqenp06PSAhVLmBoKHapNCLEQ_AUIBigB https://www.google.pt/search?q=knives+site:http://everydayca...
- DanBlake 10y agoWe are looking for links to products on other sites- for instance https://www.google.com/search?q=gerber+shard&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=gerber+shard&source=lnms&tbm... Also, the link you give above is just googles normal link. You cant programmatically call it, or google will start throwing up a captcha which will stop automated queries.
- merricksb 10y agoDetailed article with comments from a Google spokesperson: http://fortune.com/2017/02/21/google-site-search-discontinued/ http://fortune.com/2017/02/21/google-site-search-discontinue...
- edpichler 10y agoThat's why I think twice before embracing some Google Product.
- dpatru 10y agoWhat is so hard technically about site search that there doesn't exist open-source solutions for people to run on their own sites or rent for a small fee?
- simonistvan 10y agoIf you are running an eCommerce site and you are looking to improve your search www.prefixbox.com can be an alternative. We are developing it for 2.5 years now and it is a data driven solution. BR, Istvan Simon
- Sytten 10y agoI suggest using Coveo, it's the recommended thing to replace google enterprise search. Much more intelligent and better integration with the data. It's already used by majors companies like GoPro, Adobe and L'Oréal. Yes I worked there once :)
- alasano 10y agoAnother vote for Coveo (as someone who still works there)! The overall integration, security features, analytics, connectors and machine learning functionalities are beyond anything that Google or pretty much anyone else has to offer. FYI We're also hiring and growing very rapidly! careers.coveo.com
- peppage 10y agoCoveo does look cool but at my level, $2k/yr, it's far more expensive!
- pritambarhate 10y agoLast couple of years or so have been an eye opener for me on how I choose libraries, tools and services for my project. One important lesson was that never choose a service which don't have plug and play open source alternative. Even hyped start ups go out of business and big companies like Facebook and Google shut down services. Third party APIs are a even bigger risk. Facebook and Twitter APIs used to change quite often 2-3 years ago. (Haven't personally worked on this off late though.) APIs and services which seem too cheap are generally the ones which should be avoided. Because it is more likely that the companies running these will not find a sustainable business model. Even Open Source projects get abandoned quite often. Sometimes a team puts together an impressive open source project and then they get acquired by a big company which results in abandonment of the project. I have one client who has his startup riding on Kurento Media Server for WebRTC calls. This product is in development from last one and half years. Now, after Kurento's acquisition by Twilio, Kurento's future is not clear. Also it's not a project which any body can just get into and start developing it further. Thankfully Kurento is not abandoned yet by the development team, but I had read somewhere that they are looking for new maintainers. The lesson learned is only depend on mature open source projects and depend on PaaS services which make those open source projects available as easy to use services. Even if that PaaS service go down, there is a high chance that you will find someone who can deploy and support it for you. However, if you are depending on a third party API or a relatively unknown Open Source Project for critical functionality, treat it as a big risk in your product's future road map and be prepared with a contingency plan. Right now in cloud services there are way too many products which are not easily replaceable. But these are easy to use and sometimes solve really difficult problems. So the temptation to use them is too high. So they still end up in the stack, especially when the clients themselves push for these services to be used.
- arca_vorago 10y agoI have a feeling this is geared towards pushing fortune/alexa 1000 into buying/using the google enterprise search appliance, which they charge a pretty penny for but don't allow you to see inside of (black box on the network). I was looking at one and got quoted 50k, and then when I balked and stopped communications with the sales guys they started offering price reductions... like 30k for a blackbox search appliance on my network is really something enticing!
- mish15 10y agoUnlikely, the GSA product is also discontinued. This is a push to a google cloud alternative i would guess.
- jpadkins 10y agohttps://customsearch.googleblog.com/ https://customsearch.googleblog.com/ Also posted changes coming to the CSE API.
- hypertexthero 10y agoHere's a quick and easy search form for your site: <form id="searchform" name="searchform" action="https://google.com/search"> <input class="searchtext" name="q" type="text" value="" placeholder="" maxlength="300" /> <input name="q" type="hidden" value="site:www.yoursite.tld" /> <input class="searchbutton" name="submit" type="submit" value="Search" /> </form>
- vorticalbox 10y agoAprils fool 2 years in advance.
- joeld42 10y agoI've always wondered why Google doesn't just slowly raise the prices on things like this until either everyone switches due to attrition and they can shut it down noiselessly, or it becomes profitable. There's been a few services (Google Reader and CodeSearch) that I would have paid a couple bucks a month for.
- impressthenet 10y agoAny site can free themselves from the Borg: https://duckduckgo.com/search_box https://duckduckgo.com/search_box
- impressthenet 10y agoAny site can free themselves from the Borg: https://duckduckgo.com/search_box https://duckduckgo.com/search_box