5 ms·

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

by 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
        It’s not that I lack empathy - I know many of those folks, and I’d work there if I wanted to. It’s just that an empathy towards Lenin bust factory workers doesn’t make their hard work any more useful. You’re confused, because you got it exactly backwards - most technical people who work this kind of jobs lack the big picture required to realize that the vast majority of their work is just technological debt. And some others that do get it also understand the business part - and while this overcomplication is bad technologically and user-wise, it might make sense to business. Also, let me remind you that those “most-used services” are generally of quite poor quality, both in terms of reliability and user experience. There are services that do matter - ads and tracking - and I’m guessing those are more cared about, but I’m not talking about them.
        4y ago
- dougb5 4y ago
  A lot of these "Falsehoods programmers believe about time" apply to making a timer: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
  - trasz 4y ago
    Honestly, that’s another argument against Google timer: you can’t assume it’s correct, because you don’t have any insight into its internal operation. Most people assume it can’t be bad, because Google is big and rich and popular, but both theory (argument from authority) and experience show it doesn’t hold water.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Because the complexity isn't in the timer, but in adding it to an otherwise massive pile of code that makes the rest of everything run. It's like if you're building a hotel with hundreds of rooms and you decide every room should have an installed alarm clock. The clock mechanism itself you can buy cheaply, but if you want it to look good, match your decor, and not have wires exposed, it's suddenly harder. If it was just a single-use page on timer.google.com, you'd be totally right. But having Search know that "5 minute timer" should show a timer, but "Egg timer" should show a picture of a product, and "new year's eve countdown" should probably give you a timer/countdown, but only on some days of the year, and on others it should be to videos of last year's.
  - trasz 4y ago
    In your example this “decor” is an improvement: it makes using it nicer. Can you tell me how this “fantastic engineering” makes google timer nicer? Because to me it isn’t quite obvious; what is obvious is how it makes it worse, by lowering reliability and invading privacy.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      I don't even know what you're trying to say here? If anything, the "decor" in my hotel room metaphor was a metaphor for... decor? I could make a timer that outputs ASCII text for the countdown, but if I put that as the first result in a Google Search results page, it would look weird and out of place. As far as I know, Google having consistent CSS doesn't lower their reliability and invade my privacy. There was never a Google Timer that wasn't a part of search, so it always was going to need to integrate with search. If you just want a website to load with a timer, there's plenty of other options. I get it, you don't like Google, you think they make products that are bad for people and privacy. All of that I mostly agree with. That's a set of complaints that, as far as I can tell, have no relation to if Google Search still has a timer feature. Even if they stripped out all of the tracking and whatever you think is making them not have "reliability", the remaining search engine would still be an impressive and hard to integrate with bit of code. You see this in the cost to develop and run services like Kagi or the belated Runnaroo search engine, both of which were far better about personal privacy and, amusingly, less reliable than Google.

by bhawks 4y ago

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
      It’s not that I lack empathy - I know many of those folks, and I’d work there if I wanted to. It’s just that an empathy towards Lenin bust factory workers doesn’t make their hard work any more useful. You’re confused, because you got it exactly backwards - most technical people who work this kind of jobs lack the big picture required to realize that the vast majority of their work is just technological debt. And some others that do get it also understand the business part - and while this overcomplication is bad technologically and user-wise, it might make sense to business. Also, let me remind you that those “most-used services” are generally of quite poor quality, both in terms of reliability and user experience. There are services that do matter - ads and tracking - and I’m guessing those are more cared about, but I’m not talking about them.
      - 4y ago
dougb5 4y ago
A lot of these "Falsehoods programmers believe about time" apply to making a timer: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
- trasz 4y ago
  Honestly, that’s another argument against Google timer: you can’t assume it’s correct, because you don’t have any insight into its internal operation. Most people assume it can’t be bad, because Google is big and rich and popular, but both theory (argument from authority) and experience show it doesn’t hold water.
noirbot 4y ago
Because the complexity isn't in the timer, but in adding it to an otherwise massive pile of code that makes the rest of everything run. It's like if you're building a hotel with hundreds of rooms and you decide every room should have an installed alarm clock. The clock mechanism itself you can buy cheaply, but if you want it to look good, match your decor, and not have wires exposed, it's suddenly harder. If it was just a single-use page on timer.google.com, you'd be totally right. But having Search know that "5 minute timer" should show a timer, but "Egg timer" should show a picture of a product, and "new year's eve countdown" should probably give you a timer/countdown, but only on some days of the year, and on others it should be to videos of last year's.
- trasz 4y ago
  In your example this “decor” is an improvement: it makes using it nicer. Can you tell me how this “fantastic engineering” makes google timer nicer? Because to me it isn’t quite obvious; what is obvious is how it makes it worse, by lowering reliability and invading privacy.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I don't even know what you're trying to say here? If anything, the "decor" in my hotel room metaphor was a metaphor for... decor? I could make a timer that outputs ASCII text for the countdown, but if I put that as the first result in a Google Search results page, it would look weird and out of place. As far as I know, Google having consistent CSS doesn't lower their reliability and invade my privacy. There was never a Google Timer that wasn't a part of search, so it always was going to need to integrate with search. If you just want a website to load with a timer, there's plenty of other options. I get it, you don't like Google, you think they make products that are bad for people and privacy. All of that I mostly agree with. That's a set of complaints that, as far as I can tell, have no relation to if Google Search still has a timer feature. Even if they stripped out all of the tracking and whatever you think is making them not have "reliability", the remaining search engine would still be an impressive and hard to integrate with bit of code. You see this in the cost to develop and run services like Kagi or the belated Runnaroo search engine, both of which were far better about personal privacy and, amusingly, less reliable than Google.