10 ms·

Google quietly launches an AI-powered Pinterest rival named Keen

61 points by SanderMak 6y ago

president 6y ago
I give it a year before the project gets canned. Google is great at tools and utilities (e.g. Maps, Gmail) but whenever they try their hand at something that involves the human soul, they fail at attracting regular people. For all of Pinterest's faults, at least their branding is such that most people don't see it as a generic giant corporation.
- buboard 6y ago
  They just want to displace pinterest's SEO from their image search results. This could actually be useful for them
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I think they've also done some stuff at different times to displace Facebook from somewhere or other, anyway my bet is as follows: this is someone's project to get noticed for being innovative and moved on to somewhere else with more money and then this gets staffed with people not on the fast track who will try their best to get out of it and finally it will close down and if anyone has been suckered into using it they will write an article about how Google closed it down and then HN will repeat the ever expanding list of things Google has closed down. Something may have just made me cynical about Google products though.
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    Maybe just stop linking to pinterest pages or images and just link to the real pages pinterest is taking from? Pinterest is such a dark pattern of 7 clicks to actually see the damned image in google results.
  - logicslave 6y ago
    The interesting thing is google knows alot about what is popular on pintrest
  - ericd 6y ago
    That's how you inch towards antitrust.
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  > For all of Pinterest's faults, at least their branding is such that most people don't see it as a generic giant corporation. There's also a general faith that Pinterest will actually keep their service open in a few years. With Google, it's a crap-shoot if it gets any updates 6 months from now. EDIT: after reading more about "Keen," and trying it a bit, my bet is that it will be like Google Spaces - an interesting idea with some utility, but will die out because they won't have "Google scale" engagement to keep funding it. EDIT 2: I also learned that Google Collections is the exact same thing. This is Hangouts vs. Allo vs. Duo vs. Spaces all over again.
reaperducer 6y ago
Is this something that really needs to be "AI-powered," whatever that means?
- pibefision 6y ago
  It is because you as a human are supervising and improving their algorithm. Another case of free products where you are the product.
- w4hirelife99 6y ago
  “Does a company that has only ever crawled through other peoples content to lift its visibility by their rules really need to keep doing that?”
imedadel 6y ago
> An experimental product from Area 120 and PAIR at Google Well, I guess that won't make people switch from Pinterest...
bberenberg 6y ago
There are lots of conversations about ideological echo chambers online. I am concerned that tools like Pinterest and now Keen may be creating creative echo chambers that result in large swaths of artists drawing from the same few styles to help build their own.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  I've felt this way about Pinterest for some time. It doesn't really follow any sort of trends, there is just a "Pinterest style" that's basically a meme. It was cool for a while when Pinterest was new, but it looks out-of-date these days and the echo chamber hasn't seemed to notice that people have moved on.
- jagannathtech 6y ago
  we already have it 'dribbblisation of design'
tengbretson 6y ago
Will a competitor to Pinterest make google images more broken or less broken? I need to know before I make up my mind to like or dislike this
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Objectively, pinterest broke Google Image Search so I can’t see how another player could make it worse. If you posit that a single link is shared on both platforms, the chances of getting to the original source are at least greater than 1x.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
panpanna 6y ago
I hate Pinterest, all it does is to pollute my search results with garbage. If I search for something I want to get to the source, not some middleman. Why do we need an alternative??
- Hoasi 6y ago
  > If I search for something I want to get to the source, not some middleman It's unfortunate, the only mitigation, for now, is for the source to use the middleman to link back to the source.
- loxs 6y ago
  Use DuckDuckGo
- mattwad 6y ago
  I love Pinterest for bookmarking things. Like, if I want to buy a new pair of hiking pants and shop around, I save them all to a new board. Dinner recipes, things like that. But I never look at the feeds or things they suggest.
- pen2l 6y ago
  > all it does is to pollute my search results with garbage. I agree, what I'm most surprised by is it suffers no penalties from Google. Why is consistently on the top for so many searches? How is it that news journals who go the mile of writing things and put it behind a paywall suffer the wrath of Google ranking them down, but a compilation site that erects so many hoops and hassles to get you to the image you found it for on Google is consistently on the top?
- zem 6y ago
  i love the idea of pinterest, and people's curated boards used to be very high-value search results for a lot of terms. what turned them to garbage was the change to not showing you result pages if you were not logged in to pinterest.
- smcameron 6y ago
  I've taken to adding -site:pinterest.* to my searches. Google should de-index pinterest.
ible 6y ago
It must be uncomfortable being a google engineer on these products. Having your work cancelled and thrown away is one of the most disheartening things as a developer. It has to be back of mind for them when they are building. When it gets released they get to come see all the comments better on how long until Google kills it, and the people who won’t try it because of that risk.
- always_left 6y ago
  So... a startup?
  - ilikehurdles 6y ago
    Except, the engineers get paid adequately.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Sure, it's a trade-off in what sort of upside and control you want.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Interesting. I don't think everyone shares that perspective. Certainly I think this software is sort of like an oil exploration expedition. It's going to cost a lot of work, there's a lot of stuff on-site you can't really reuse, and at the end you sometimes fail to find oil. But you built the thing to search for the oil, not to get the oil. Shell spent billions on trying to find oil in the Chukchi Sea and there isn't enough to be worth it. But if you don't do things like that you don't find the other big finds. That's why you don't fall in love with the software. It's there to see if the product is viable. Honestly, I like that environment.
  - rurp 6y ago
    But in Google's case they often do find oil, but then just dump it in the ocean. Lots of people used and enjoyed Inbox, Hangouts, Reader, etc, etc; but Google just discarded them anyway. Spending years building something that thousands/millions of people end up using and liking, and then seeing it killed anyway, has to be discouraging.
wzy 6y ago
Google++
binaryfour 6y ago
How many times is Google going to try these things before they realize that's not their differentiator as a business?
- convolvatron 6y ago
  when the giant ocean of money they swim in starts to dry up
kgin 6y ago
Google needs an entirely separate brand/entity to launch these things. Nobody wants to hang out at the utility company office no matter how much free coffee they put in the lobby.
- t0mas88 6y ago
  They have YouTube that would be fine for this.
- throwaway0220 6y ago
  > Google needs an entirely separate brand/entity to launch these things. From the very first paragraph: "Google’s Area 120 team, an internal incubator that creates experimental apps and services, has launched Keen..." In a way this is exactly what you're suggesting: an entirely separate identity [1] to launch these experiments, and avoid direct association with Google's core products. Keen's site[2] only mention Google in the footer. Of course, "Google launches a Pinterest-rival" makes it sound more juicy than "Area 120 launches an experimental product"... (disclaimer: Googler, but no affiliation with A120 or the product. I'm hearing for the first time here) [1] https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/ [2] https://staykeen.com/home https://staykeen.com/home
s3r3nity 6y ago
So this is just Google Collections, which already existed? [1] Why did you need to create yet another new app for something you already do - just focus on improving the existing product. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/googles-collections-feature-now-pushes-people-to-save-recipes-products-using-a-i/#:~:text=Originally%20a%20name%20given%20to,to%20Collections%20based%20on%20your https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/googles-collections-featur...
- stepstop 6y ago
  This phenomenon has been written about on HN before. The gist is that some Google product manager launched this so they could get promoted. They and a few of the team will get promoted, and then the product will be forgotten, and eventually shut down like everything else.
burlesona 6y ago
Google launches and then kills new products so frequently it makes me extremely reluctant to try anything new. Best case the product sucks and I don't care. Worst case I love it and they shut it down a year later. I'm otherwise a pretty enthusiastic early adopter of most things tech, but when Google is the brand behind it I feel like it's not worth even looking until the thing has become huge otherwise it's just going to get shuttered.
- Traster 6y ago
  Yup, came here for the "start the stopwatch" comment. Google probably needs to dump the Google brand now. Google is a great search engine and a crappy company. They either need a massive string of successful new product launches with notable examples of where they've refused to dump a product for decades, or they need to dump the brand that they've tarnished.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  I've always considered getting rid of the Google vs Google Labs distinction was one of the dumbest brand decisions of all time. That it hasn't been brought back in some form really speaks volumes on the level and lack of strategic leadership in the last few years.
- m463 6y ago
  I wonder why this happens. Is it engineers internally that gather up momentum for a projects, see it to fruition and then folks move to other projects? Or is it the sort of "google waterwheel" that scoops up non-google participants, gets them to create a google account, and in a few years moves on to other corners of the internet? the end result is that google seems to "dabble"
  - gumby 6y ago
    I think there are two factors. One is the standard big company political issues thing. Bad products are sustained, good ones killed because the bad one happened to have a manager who couldn't listen or see clearly, and had some political credibility while the good one lacked political strength. This is simply one of the pathologies of big organizations. (even the best large organizations suffer seriously from this problem, and I doubt many would consider google to be particularly well run. They have a huge gusher of money flowing their way even if everybody went home for a week, so have no competitive pressure to improve on that dimension). This interlocks with the second factor. 87% of their revenue comes from one source and that source is very large. So you could start a new project, generate some revenue, but if it isn't on a growth trajectory that would move that 87% down, well, is it really worth investing in? I believe this is why Nest was brought onto Google's balance sheet: it contributes something around a percent or so to google's revenue, which helped push that number down slightly. By contrast, look at Apple which has a (slightly) diversified set of products; they continue to invest in macs and ipads which don't constitute a huge percentage of revenue (though they'd be F200 or F100 businesses were they on their own). Apple is so secretive, even internally, you'd think they were worse run than google but somehow it works. Perhaps that secrecy makes the internal fighting harder as only a small number of people who know each other well end up seeing the big picture? I haven't the faintest idea.
pradn 6y ago
It's borderline journalistic malpractice to say "Google" launched this, when it's clearly from the internal incubator, Area 120. This distinction is important - projects in Area 120 have different aspirations and fold frequently. I know people have this perception that Google kills projects too easily, and this just feeds it without good reason. Like - they're telling you to expect a rocky ride, and people will still complain when it folds.
- harshalizee 6y ago
  99% of consumers absolutely do not care of it was part of an incubator or otherwise. It's still funded by the Google/Alphabet umbrella and that's the only thing that most users will use to form an opinion on whether they'd like to try it out or not. Ironically, the fact that it came out of an incubator have me the impression that it's highly experimental and will likely die earlier than most other Google products.
  - pradn 6y ago
    99% of consumer won't even know where it's from unless they look it up. Hell, you'd be surprised by how many people don't know Android and YouTube are by Google. It's misleading to mention it's from Google and not from the incubator if it's in the tech press.
niutech 6y ago
Do you remember So.cl from Microsoft? It will certainly share its fate.
nikolay 6y ago
No vanity URLs, no thank you! :D
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Well it does look like an interesting experiment. All the standard warnings about lack of privacy on Keen, treat it like you would FaceBook, enjoy checking it out, but treat it much as you would a rattlesnake on a hiking trail. I almost regret reading the book Surveillance Capitalism because life before that was like ignorant life in the move Matrix (except for me, I could have written a shorter version of SC myself). Reading that book was definitely taking the Red Pill. I don’t blame anyone for continuing the good old Blue Pill lifestyle :-) EDIT: it is interesting how the site is not really “Google branded” at all. Just in the fine print “ Keen - An experimental product from Area 120 and PAIR at Google”
nojvek 6y ago
Google is pretty awful at maintaining anything that isn’t a billion dollar profit maker. They also suck at doing anything social network related. Pinterest shouldn’t have much to worry about. They could copy the good ideas like Facebook copied circles when Google Plus came out. Google’s brand is tainted. They are real good at search, tracking and shoving ads. Not so great at fostering things from 0 and maintaining them.
srack20210 6y ago
there is no way i am trying any service out of google now... sorry google, but the trust has broken...

61 points by SanderMak 6y ago

I give it a year before the project gets canned. Google is great at tools and utilities (e.g. Maps, Gmail) but whenever they try their hand at something that involves the human soul, they fail at attracting regular people. For all of Pinterest's faults, at least their branding is such that most people don't see it as a generic giant corporation.

buboard 6y ago
They just want to displace pinterest's SEO from their image search results. This could actually be useful for them
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I think they've also done some stuff at different times to displace Facebook from somewhere or other, anyway my bet is as follows: this is someone's project to get noticed for being innovative and moved on to somewhere else with more money and then this gets staffed with people not on the fast track who will try their best to get out of it and finally it will close down and if anyone has been suckered into using it they will write an article about how Google closed it down and then HN will repeat the ever expanding list of things Google has closed down. Something may have just made me cynical about Google products though.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  Maybe just stop linking to pinterest pages or images and just link to the real pages pinterest is taking from? Pinterest is such a dark pattern of 7 clicks to actually see the damned image in google results.
- logicslave 6y ago
  The interesting thing is google knows alot about what is popular on pintrest
- ericd 6y ago
  That's how you inch towards antitrust.
s3r3nity 6y ago
> For all of Pinterest's faults, at least their branding is such that most people don't see it as a generic giant corporation. There's also a general faith that Pinterest will actually keep their service open in a few years. With Google, it's a crap-shoot if it gets any updates 6 months from now. EDIT: after reading more about "Keen," and trying it a bit, my bet is that it will be like Google Spaces - an interesting idea with some utility, but will die out because they won't have "Google scale" engagement to keep funding it. EDIT 2: I also learned that Google Collections is the exact same thing. This is Hangouts vs. Allo vs. Duo vs. Spaces all over again.

reaperducer 6y ago

Is this something that really needs to be "AI-powered," whatever that means?

pibefision 6y ago
It is because you as a human are supervising and improving their algorithm. Another case of free products where you are the product.
w4hirelife99 6y ago
“Does a company that has only ever crawled through other peoples content to lift its visibility by their rules really need to keep doing that?”

imedadel 6y ago

> An experimental product from Area 120 and PAIR at Google Well, I guess that won't make people switch from Pinterest...

bberenberg 6y ago

There are lots of conversations about ideological echo chambers online. I am concerned that tools like Pinterest and now Keen may be creating creative echo chambers that result in large swaths of artists drawing from the same few styles to help build their own.

wayoutthere 6y ago
I've felt this way about Pinterest for some time. It doesn't really follow any sort of trends, there is just a "Pinterest style" that's basically a meme. It was cool for a while when Pinterest was new, but it looks out-of-date these days and the echo chamber hasn't seemed to notice that people have moved on.
jagannathtech 6y ago
we already have it 'dribbblisation of design'

tengbretson 6y ago

Will a competitor to Pinterest make google images more broken or less broken? I need to know before I make up my mind to like or dislike this

ComputerGuru 6y ago
Objectively, pinterest broke Google Image Search so I can’t see how another player could make it worse. If you posit that a single link is shared on both platforms, the chances of getting to the original source are at least greater than 1x.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

panpanna 6y ago

I hate Pinterest, all it does is to pollute my search results with garbage. If I search for something I want to get to the source, not some middleman. Why do we need an alternative??

Hoasi 6y ago
> If I search for something I want to get to the source, not some middleman It's unfortunate, the only mitigation, for now, is for the source to use the middleman to link back to the source.
loxs 6y ago
Use DuckDuckGo
mattwad 6y ago
I love Pinterest for bookmarking things. Like, if I want to buy a new pair of hiking pants and shop around, I save them all to a new board. Dinner recipes, things like that. But I never look at the feeds or things they suggest.
pen2l 6y ago
> all it does is to pollute my search results with garbage. I agree, what I'm most surprised by is it suffers no penalties from Google. Why is consistently on the top for so many searches? How is it that news journals who go the mile of writing things and put it behind a paywall suffer the wrath of Google ranking them down, but a compilation site that erects so many hoops and hassles to get you to the image you found it for on Google is consistently on the top?
zem 6y ago
i love the idea of pinterest, and people's curated boards used to be very high-value search results for a lot of terms. what turned them to garbage was the change to not showing you result pages if you were not logged in to pinterest.
smcameron 6y ago
I've taken to adding -site:pinterest.* to my searches. Google should de-index pinterest.

ible 6y ago

It must be uncomfortable being a google engineer on these products. Having your work cancelled and thrown away is one of the most disheartening things as a developer. It has to be back of mind for them when they are building. When it gets released they get to come see all the comments better on how long until Google kills it, and the people who won’t try it because of that risk.

always_left 6y ago
So... a startup?
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  Except, the engineers get paid adequately.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Sure, it's a trade-off in what sort of upside and control you want.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting. I don't think everyone shares that perspective. Certainly I think this software is sort of like an oil exploration expedition. It's going to cost a lot of work, there's a lot of stuff on-site you can't really reuse, and at the end you sometimes fail to find oil. But you built the thing to search for the oil, not to get the oil. Shell spent billions on trying to find oil in the Chukchi Sea and there isn't enough to be worth it. But if you don't do things like that you don't find the other big finds. That's why you don't fall in love with the software. It's there to see if the product is viable. Honestly, I like that environment.
- rurp 6y ago
  But in Google's case they often do find oil, but then just dump it in the ocean. Lots of people used and enjoyed Inbox, Hangouts, Reader, etc, etc; but Google just discarded them anyway. Spending years building something that thousands/millions of people end up using and liking, and then seeing it killed anyway, has to be discouraging.

wzy 6y ago

Google++

binaryfour 6y ago

How many times is Google going to try these things before they realize that's not their differentiator as a business?

convolvatron 6y ago
when the giant ocean of money they swim in starts to dry up

kgin 6y ago

Google needs an entirely separate brand/entity to launch these things. Nobody wants to hang out at the utility company office no matter how much free coffee they put in the lobby.

t0mas88 6y ago
They have YouTube that would be fine for this.
throwaway0220 6y ago
> Google needs an entirely separate brand/entity to launch these things. From the very first paragraph: "Google’s Area 120 team, an internal incubator that creates experimental apps and services, has launched Keen..." In a way this is exactly what you're suggesting: an entirely separate identity [1] to launch these experiments, and avoid direct association with Google's core products. Keen's site[2] only mention Google in the footer. Of course, "Google launches a Pinterest-rival" makes it sound more juicy than "Area 120 launches an experimental product"... (disclaimer: Googler, but no affiliation with A120 or the product. I'm hearing for the first time here) [1] https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/ [2] https://staykeen.com/home https://staykeen.com/home

s3r3nity 6y ago

So this is just Google Collections, which already existed? [1] Why did you need to create yet another new app for something you already do - just focus on improving the existing product. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/googles-collections-feature-now-pushes-people-to-save-recipes-products-using-a-i/#:~:text=Originally%20a%20name%20given%20to,to%20Collections%20based%20on%20your https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/googles-collections-featur...

stepstop 6y ago
This phenomenon has been written about on HN before. The gist is that some Google product manager launched this so they could get promoted. They and a few of the team will get promoted, and then the product will be forgotten, and eventually shut down like everything else.

burlesona 6y ago

Google launches and then kills new products so frequently it makes me extremely reluctant to try anything new. Best case the product sucks and I don't care. Worst case I love it and they shut it down a year later. I'm otherwise a pretty enthusiastic early adopter of most things tech, but when Google is the brand behind it I feel like it's not worth even looking until the thing has become huge otherwise it's just going to get shuttered.

Traster 6y ago
Yup, came here for the "start the stopwatch" comment. Google probably needs to dump the Google brand now. Google is a great search engine and a crappy company. They either need a massive string of successful new product launches with notable examples of where they've refused to dump a product for decades, or they need to dump the brand that they've tarnished.
andromeduck 6y ago
I've always considered getting rid of the Google vs Google Labs distinction was one of the dumbest brand decisions of all time. That it hasn't been brought back in some form really speaks volumes on the level and lack of strategic leadership in the last few years.
m463 6y ago
I wonder why this happens. Is it engineers internally that gather up momentum for a projects, see it to fruition and then folks move to other projects? Or is it the sort of "google waterwheel" that scoops up non-google participants, gets them to create a google account, and in a few years moves on to other corners of the internet? the end result is that google seems to "dabble"
- gumby 6y ago
  I think there are two factors. One is the standard big company political issues thing. Bad products are sustained, good ones killed because the bad one happened to have a manager who couldn't listen or see clearly, and had some political credibility while the good one lacked political strength. This is simply one of the pathologies of big organizations. (even the best large organizations suffer seriously from this problem, and I doubt many would consider google to be particularly well run. They have a huge gusher of money flowing their way even if everybody went home for a week, so have no competitive pressure to improve on that dimension). This interlocks with the second factor. 87% of their revenue comes from one source and that source is very large. So you could start a new project, generate some revenue, but if it isn't on a growth trajectory that would move that 87% down, well, is it really worth investing in? I believe this is why Nest was brought onto Google's balance sheet: it contributes something around a percent or so to google's revenue, which helped push that number down slightly. By contrast, look at Apple which has a (slightly) diversified set of products; they continue to invest in macs and ipads which don't constitute a huge percentage of revenue (though they'd be F200 or F100 businesses were they on their own). Apple is so secretive, even internally, you'd think they were worse run than google but somehow it works. Perhaps that secrecy makes the internal fighting harder as only a small number of people who know each other well end up seeing the big picture? I haven't the faintest idea.

pradn 6y ago

It's borderline journalistic malpractice to say "Google" launched this, when it's clearly from the internal incubator, Area 120. This distinction is important - projects in Area 120 have different aspirations and fold frequently. I know people have this perception that Google kills projects too easily, and this just feeds it without good reason. Like - they're telling you to expect a rocky ride, and people will still complain when it folds.

harshalizee 6y ago
99% of consumers absolutely do not care of it was part of an incubator or otherwise. It's still funded by the Google/Alphabet umbrella and that's the only thing that most users will use to form an opinion on whether they'd like to try it out or not. Ironically, the fact that it came out of an incubator have me the impression that it's highly experimental and will likely die earlier than most other Google products.
- pradn 6y ago
  99% of consumer won't even know where it's from unless they look it up. Hell, you'd be surprised by how many people don't know Android and YouTube are by Google. It's misleading to mention it's from Google and not from the incubator if it's in the tech press.

niutech 6y ago

Do you remember So.cl from Microsoft? It will certainly share its fate.

nikolay 6y ago

No vanity URLs, no thank you! :D

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Well it does look like an interesting experiment. All the standard warnings about lack of privacy on Keen, treat it like you would FaceBook, enjoy checking it out, but treat it much as you would a rattlesnake on a hiking trail. I almost regret reading the book Surveillance Capitalism because life before that was like ignorant life in the move Matrix (except for me, I could have written a shorter version of SC myself). Reading that book was definitely taking the Red Pill. I don’t blame anyone for continuing the good old Blue Pill lifestyle :-) EDIT: it is interesting how the site is not really “Google branded” at all. Just in the fine print “ Keen - An experimental product from Area 120 and PAIR at Google”

nojvek 6y ago

Google is pretty awful at maintaining anything that isn’t a billion dollar profit maker. They also suck at doing anything social network related. Pinterest shouldn’t have much to worry about. They could copy the good ideas like Facebook copied circles when Google Plus came out. Google’s brand is tainted. They are real good at search, tracking and shoving ads. Not so great at fostering things from 0 and maintaining them.

srack20210 6y ago

there is no way i am trying any service out of google now... sorry google, but the trust has broken...