6 ms·

I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google

I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft. Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything. It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.

nextaccountic 6y ago
> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now" This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product. The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.
KMag 6y ago
Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer. (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  > (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.) Damnatio memoriae? > Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
  - SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
    Neat. How did you know that? (The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)
    - matkoniecz 6y ago
      I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful. I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere. I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%... "Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication. (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)

nextaccountic 6y ago

> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now" This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.

squarefoot 6y ago
And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product. The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.

KMag 6y ago

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer. (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)

matkoniecz 6y ago
> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.) Damnatio memoriae? > Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
- SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
  Neat. How did you know that? (The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful. I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere. I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%... "Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication. (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)