4 ms·

I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed. There are so many search features that no one can count them (people were proud about that and also the fact th

by bhawks 4y ago

I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed. There are so many search features that no one can count them (people were proud about that and also the fact there was no list of all of them). Most likely a ranking change is stopping the feature from being triggered. Someone will read this and it'll be silently fixed in a week or 2.

jacquesm 4y ago
> I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed. Why? They've done this time and time again. Google is its own worst enemy in this respect. I have our whole company standardized on Google because I still see them as the least bad option but I live in fear of losing some critical functionality because of an 'upgrade'.
- bhawks 4y ago
  Because I have first hand experience on a good swath of the search stack. Shuttering a standalone product is mostly an organizational effort. Removing a search feature is a coding adventure. One feature is sprinkled across the code base like pixie dust, magically becoming a count down timer to serve a users query. It is simply too high a cost to go and remove a single feature. It is also highly unlikely that leadership would approve bricking a swath of search features for technical reasons, it is just not in the organizational culture. It's a bug that'll be fixed when someone notices.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Building something I agree with you, that's difficult. Shutting something down is a one bit affair. After that how long you take to remove the now dead code is an entirely different matter.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Can you explain how a timer could be complex, apart from impressively bad engineering?
    - bhawks 4y ago
      First you need to understand that the intent of the query string is to set a timer. Human language is ambiguous so there can be many competing interpretations. Then you have to take all the intentions and ask backends to fulfill them with their actual results Then you sort the result by the correct order for the user. Then you need to render the search page. At this points some results may not want to be present anymore because they are not the top result. That's a 50'000 foot approximation of what happens when you query Google. The process has tons more complexity as you zoom in. It is amazing engineering, but probably not the first way you'd go about implementing a count down timer.
      - trasz 4y ago
        I’d say using tons of “amazing engineering” to implement something that’s functionally equivalent to a trivial shell script is a rather poor engineering.
        doctor_eval 4y ago
        The point is that it's not really the timer that's complex. It's the path taken to determine that a timer should be displayed in response to a search query. The timer itself is presumably fairly trivial.
        noirbot 4y ago
        I am honestly confused how people have so little experience and empathy for engineering, even on a forum like this. Do you actually work somewhere where you're providing one of the most-used services in the world and it's held together by "trivial shell scripts"? Do you really think people at Google are so bad at their jobs that they went "Well, this is 4 lines of Bash, but I could make this needlessly complex for no reason" It's not as if they're the height of engineering, but the arrogance to just assume that there's no reasonable factors that may have not lead them to doing something more simply is so foreign to me.
        trasz 4y ago
danesparza 4y ago
Tell this to Google Reader. Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

by bhawks 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

> I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed. Why? They've done this time and time again. Google is its own worst enemy in this respect. I have our whole company standardized on Google because I still see them as the least bad option but I live in fear of losing some critical functionality because of an 'upgrade'.

bhawks 4y ago
Because I have first hand experience on a good swath of the search stack. Shuttering a standalone product is mostly an organizational effort. Removing a search feature is a coding adventure. One feature is sprinkled across the code base like pixie dust, magically becoming a count down timer to serve a users query. It is simply too high a cost to go and remove a single feature. It is also highly unlikely that leadership would approve bricking a swath of search features for technical reasons, it is just not in the organizational culture. It's a bug that'll be fixed when someone notices.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Building something I agree with you, that's difficult. Shutting something down is a one bit affair. After that how long you take to remove the now dead code is an entirely different matter.
- trasz 4y ago
  Can you explain how a timer could be complex, apart from impressively bad engineering?
  - bhawks 4y ago
    First you need to understand that the intent of the query string is to set a timer. Human language is ambiguous so there can be many competing interpretations. Then you have to take all the intentions and ask backends to fulfill them with their actual results Then you sort the result by the correct order for the user. Then you need to render the search page. At this points some results may not want to be present anymore because they are not the top result. That's a 50'000 foot approximation of what happens when you query Google. The process has tons more complexity as you zoom in. It is amazing engineering, but probably not the first way you'd go about implementing a count down timer.
    - trasz 4y ago
      I’d say using tons of “amazing engineering” to implement something that’s functionally equivalent to a trivial shell script is a rather poor engineering.
      - doctor_eval 4y ago
        The point is that it's not really the timer that's complex. It's the path taken to determine that a timer should be displayed in response to a search query. The timer itself is presumably fairly trivial.
      - noirbot 4y ago
        I am honestly confused how people have so little experience and empathy for engineering, even on a forum like this. Do you actually work somewhere where you're providing one of the most-used services in the world and it's held together by "trivial shell scripts"? Do you really think people at Google are so bad at their jobs that they went "Well, this is 4 lines of Bash, but I could make this needlessly complex for no reason" It's not as if they're the height of engineering, but the arrogance to just assume that there's no reasonable factors that may have not lead them to doing something more simply is so foreign to me.
        trasz 4y ago

danesparza 4y ago

Tell this to Google Reader. Not that I'm bitter, or anything.