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Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the site

Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the sites as static dumps and continue serving them. At no point was the cost in terms of compute/storage/network even a consideration. In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on. In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost. I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.

ramses0 6y ago
“Google search doesn’t surface sites hosted on google sites, therefore the sites get no visitors, therefore we will remove the sites. Q.E.D.” “””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
- TLightful 6y ago
  “””Our company mission is to organize the world's * adverts * and make them universally accessible and useful.””” Fixed. I have no use for Google any more. They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
jolmg 6y ago
> I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless. If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.
jotaf 6y ago
> significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience A few things to consider: - The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view. - A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution. - 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.
- quest88 6y ago
  Just a quick rebuttal to your second point: Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard. There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring? Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements? You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.
  - wikibob 6y ago
    And yet Amazon Web Services manages to STILL support SimpleDB. Many years (nearly a decade?) after being deprecated. This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work. Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
reaperducer 6y ago
I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."
giantrobot 6y ago
Yeah, old information is never useful. Might as well just delete it all. Badly styled information? Worthless. Delete it and zero out the drives.
JeremyHerrman 6y ago
Thanks for describing both the technical and business challenges involved in running real services that real people rely on, even when the service appears simple and straightforward to outsiders (even smart hn commenters). Though, it still sucks to have yet another product enter the Google Graveyard. In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.
mdriley 6y ago
Every problem you describe was successfully worked through for the Google Code turndown in 2016.

ramses0 6y ago

“Google search doesn’t surface sites hosted on google sites, therefore the sites get no visitors, therefore we will remove the sites. Q.E.D.” “””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””

TLightful 6y ago
“””Our company mission is to organize the world's * adverts * and make them universally accessible and useful.””” Fixed. I have no use for Google any more. They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.

jolmg 6y ago

> I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless. If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.

jotaf 6y ago

> significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience A few things to consider: - The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view. - A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution. - 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.

quest88 6y ago
Just a quick rebuttal to your second point: Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard. There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring? Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements? You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.
- wikibob 6y ago
  And yet Amazon Web Services manages to STILL support SimpleDB. Many years (nearly a decade?) after being deprecated. This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work. Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?
  - joshuamorton 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago

I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."

giantrobot 6y ago

Yeah, old information is never useful. Might as well just delete it all. Badly styled information? Worthless. Delete it and zero out the drives.

JeremyHerrman 6y ago

Thanks for describing both the technical and business challenges involved in running real services that real people rely on, even when the service appears simple and straightforward to outsiders (even smart hn commenters). Though, it still sucks to have yet another product enter the Google Graveyard. In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.

mdriley 6y ago

Every problem you describe was successfully worked through for the Google Code turndown in 2016.