7 ms·
Google Labs no more
No more cool apps that we can browse via google labs
- mapster 15y agoIt was an experiment that met it's natural end.
- suivix 15y agoGoogle Labs itself was an experiment? That's very meta.
- inconditus 15y agoContext: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...
- suyash 15y agoThanks!
- incongruity 15y agoI can't help but feel that this reflects a change in the mindset of Google – getting further and further from its scrappy upstart roots which are now long-since gone...
- dlss 15y agoRIP Google Sets :(
- redler 15y agoThe logic behind Sets actually lives on, at least for now, within the autofill feature of Google Spreadsheets. Fill a cell or two with sample data, then option-drag (control-drag on Windows) the square autofill handle.
- naz 15y agoYes, or if you search for "Oregano" you will notice the auto-complete for subsequent searches strongly favours herbs and spices.
- fragsworth 15y agoFor some reason the results from it just weren't that great anyway. It could never find sets of things that I really wanted to get.
- qwertyboy 15y agoMy experience was that it started out great. I found great recommendations for books, bands, foods - even drugs. But then they tweaked it. They changed something in the settings, or maybe their index changed as they grew, and it simply stopped working. Somehow it managed to become too restrictive and too general at the same time. IMHO, sets was one of the greatest things google ever made, but it died a long time ago.
- stock_toaster 15y agoI used to use this for server names. Sad to see it go.
- suivix 15y agoWhat is happening to Google? I almost feel like it's going through a transformation like Walter White.
- w1ntermute 15y agoThey're getting ready to cook up some new projects ;)
- Raphael 15y agoWouldn't Labs be a good place to link to them?
- zdw 15y agoI get the feeling that the bean counters are taking over Google and slashing off everything that doesn't have obvious monetization potential. I mean, I know great people who work there, but overall it seems like they're turning into Microsoft circa 2000 - they own the industry, they buy startups and kill the products made by about half of them. Some of their products are great, but a lot of it is just an obvious monopoly enabled money grab. I wish this wasn't the case.
- kennystone 15y agoYou would never seen something like "Labs" from Apple, and everyone applauds them for "focus".
- rdouble 15y agoApple did have "labs." One of the first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned was shut it down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Group
- viscanti 15y agoThat explanation misses a lot of context. It comes across as a criticism, as if Jobs just didn't see the benefit of research. That's not the case. He wanted to shrink the things they focused on, so they could put their 'A' team on every project (which required less projects). The end result was having a bunch of really talented guys focusing on things that drove business value.
- rdouble 15y agoI didn't intend it to be a criticism, just a factual remark. Then again, I shouldn't have really compared the two. Google labs wasn't really a dedicated research wing at Google, more like cool stuff people from various teams worked on in their spare time.
- msbarnett 15y ago
- nicklovescode 15y agoIt was the fragmentation of Google that made it so amazing. So many wonderful discoveries came from experimentation, and labs was a wonderful way to organize them. Disappointing.
- jroseattle 15y agoNotice that the shutdown of all these projects are happening on Larry's watch. Maybe it's a sharpened focus on ideas that "matter", but Google needs to try more things not less. From today's announcement about Q3 results, they still get a huge chunk of their income from advertising. They are dominant, but without another angle they are just asking to be disrupted.
- iradik 15y agoI honestly never used it, and am completely unaffected by this. What was the most successful product that emerged out of google labs?
- alastair 15y agoMaps, reader, docs
- ssttoo 15y agoMaps was bought (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History) and so was Writely, which became part of Docs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writely). Dunno about Reader.
- nostrademons 15y agoIn both cases, they were mergers of acquisitions with existing products that had already been under development internally. The version of Maps that was bought was a desktop product, not all that different from many of the other shrinkwrapped satellite mapping programs available in the late 90s, and it was only when it was fused with the web-based Google Local ideas cooking up internally that it became the innovative product people know of. It's very hard to identify accurate parentage for anything developed within Google, because the culture (and innovation process) is such that ideas get proposed, refined, merged with other ideas, abandoned, resurrected in other forms, implemented, iterated upon, and finally launched, often by many different groups. Even Google Search (usually identified with Larry & Sergey) isn't really their creation: large chunks were developed by Scott Hassan (eGroups founder and never actually a Google employee, though he had a big chunk of stock), Craig Silverstein, and various other Stanford students and early employees, and the ranking algorithm was completely rewritten early on by Amit Singhal. Oftentimes the press - or just curious Internet comments - wants a single person they can associate with a product, and so they'll take a name (usually the most famous) and make something up. That's not how it really works, though. Most ideas have many parents.
- 15y ago
- machrider 15y agoDoes anything remotely like Bell Labs exist today? Is it simply not possible with everyone tightening their belts? If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_developments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel... Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?
- kisielk 15y agoMicrosoft Research?
- manojlds 15y agoAnd it expands into many fields
- amartya916 15y agoAbsolutely. Just for the curious, though off-topic, here's a link to the various things MSR is involved with: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/areas.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/areas.aspx.
- ww520 15y agoMS Research is quite good. Done lots of fundamental research work.
- basugasubaku 15y agoMSR may be the top organization in computer science today: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7&topdomainid=2&subdomainid=0&last=5 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7...
- kisielk 15y agoLooks like IBM is quite far up there in terms of publications as well.
- itsnotvalid 15y agoThe whole domain would redirect back to google.com. Last night when I went to Googlelabs.com via the newest announcement of retirement of services from google [1] was indeed the last time I visited it. The fact that many of the labs projects are still active made it much uneasy to find those products anymore. --- [1]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/fall-sweep.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/fall-sweep.html
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nu2ycombinator 15y agoI can still access all code labs http://code.google.com/labs/ http://code.google.com/labs/
- suyash 15y agoah nice!
- DodgyEggplant 15y agoIt does align nicely with Steve Yegge's post: strive to be a platform. Let people build what they need. Don't try to be everything to everybody. Less products, more services. Maybe right, maybe wrong, but Google shows that they CAN DECIDE and I applaude them for that.
- csytan 15y agoDo they really need Labs now? Google has grown to a size where they can easily acquire promising young start-ups out in the wild. One advantage of having Labs back in the day was that projects could have the backing of Google's infrastructure. Now, with cloud services like AWS, the bar is set low enough that anyone has access to this kind of stuff. How hard is it to start a YouTube in this day and age?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- alexscheelmeyer 15y agoI think they are entirely right in shutting down this outward facing display of unfinished ideas/projects. I also think they could have done much better than just redirecting it to google.com. Instead of trying to emulate Apple, they should acknowledge that their culture is different and very nerdy. So I think what they should have done instead is to highlight that and use "labs" to instead show off their technical prowess, much in they same vein as what Festo has done : http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9617.htm http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9617.htm A flapping wings robot, how cool is that?! Google could really do something similar, and the world would love them for it. Instead they look more and more like a big corporation with all the boring "common sense" and mediocrity that comes with it.
- suyash 15y agohttp://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...
- magictim 15y agoBAD
- johnx123-up 15y agoRIP. Rebirth of "Google acquisition era" (Jaiku, et al.)?
- ck2 15y agoGoogle had record profits - why are they killing all their incubators? If they kill "20% time" next then we know their best days are over.
- cpeterso 15y agoNone of the Google engineers I've met had 20% Time projects. They said 20% Time was not common for application teams because they had more visible release deadlines than the web teams.
- FuzzyDunlop 15y agoWhile there's no longer a specific Labs section, they do still have Google Code, and my guess is that you'll still find the odd experiment popping up on there every now and then (and naturally gaining publicity through word of mouth).
- jlees 15y agoThere are still places within Google where people can run independent projects and experimental stuff. Innovation isn't dead. :)
- mkr-hn 15y agoThere was a great Labs feature I missed after they killed it: "What's around here?" All the button did was add an asterisk to the search box, and that still works.
- clebio 15y agoThe most disconcerting thing is that a Google search for one of the Labs projects doesn't handle this change in any elegant way. I went looking for a description of Google Sets (http://www.google.com/search?q=google+sets http://www.google.com/search?q=google+sets), but the most relevant links either redirect or give 404. The one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.