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This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again. Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right no

This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again. Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader, labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ollysb 14y ago
I think they were just crowdsourcing the pruning effort. I don't have experts exchange blocked and I haven't seen it appear in my results for months.
- brokentone 14y ago
  Interesting theory, and genius if that's what they were doing with it. However, pulling it back off the market makes it look as though they failed at this.
  - zem 14y ago
    or that they succeeded well enough that they no longer need additional data. note from the description of the panda algorithm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda] "Google Panda affects the ranking of an entire site or a specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site."
deelowe 14y ago
Experts exchange stopped showing up in the results back when Google released the new indexing engine over a year ago. You should be fine.
- brokentone 14y ago
  Thanks for the update! I'm less concerned now.
- eknkc 14y ago
  I still see it sometimes. Meanwhile, Quora is in the works to become next EE...
  - evilduck 14y ago
    Already is. I noticed the Google Blocklist was broken explicitly because I was trying to remove Quora from my results. Quora is another example of a company/site imploding.
  - polynomial 14y ago
    I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?
    - calebegg 14y ago
      They seem to be showing up for me. I don't have any recent organic examples, but here's query for one of the most popular threads, and the quora thread is the first result: https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+habit+of+procrastinating https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab... What do you mean by "private site"? The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers unless you log in. That really sucks.
      - pyre 14y ago
        EE never hid their answers. They were only obfuscated. First[1] they made it look like the page ended, but you could scroll further and get the answers. Later, I saw that they had a section that looks like the answers, but all of the text was blurred. Again, if you scrolled past the 'end of the site' you could still get to the answers. Looks like Quora gives you the question, and the first answer, but all other answers are Private-Only. [1] I think that in the beginning they may have really hidden their answers, but were forced to actually show them by Google.
        codezero 14y ago
- maqr 14y ago
  But somehow Quora still has first page results.
malandrew 14y ago
I just want to see w3schools stop showing up at the top of results before MDN, which is a much higher quality resource.
- eknkc 14y ago
  You're right. I have an Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com http://www.alfredapp.com if using mac) shortcut to search google with "mdn" suffix.
philwelch 14y ago
According to various sources, Larry Page had occasion to speak with Steve Jobs and ask his advice--in general terms--a few months before Jobs' death. Jobs originally wasn't inclined to give Page his time (he was still bitter about Android) but felt that, as he had reached out to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs himself, he should pay it forward. Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important products and prune the rest. It appears Google is now following this advice.
- hackernewbie 14y ago
  Works great for a company that risks generating a lot of noise to consumers (i.e. producing and marketing physical products). But for Google it's pervasiveness and breadth of services were part of the appeal, it's not like it's minor products interfered with the major parts of the company nor cost them much to maintain.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    The niche services that have been killed were (by definition) used by small groups, groups which tend to be over-represented here and on other tech-oriented outlets. Even a service like Reader was something that only a small number of people used (compared to e.g. gMail). One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    I agree that Jobs' advice was a mismatch for Google. Trying a million things and seeing what sticks, like an incubator, is a better idea for Google. The problem is when that turns into Microsoft-esque trend chasing. But that only happens when upper management focuses on trend chasing. Otherwise they just end up as passing experiments.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
andrewtbham 14y ago
larry page is trying to make the company more focussed (as per the advice of steve jobs). eric schmidt had a very different and unfocused philosophy. besides google reader, most of the cuts have been good or just not important. I always felt like this feature was a reaction to blekko search engine, and not very interesting. curiously i found myself not wanting to block crappy sites like ehow just cuz they might have a good page and would rather just trust google.
- just2n 14y ago
  I can provide evidence that this is a horrible idea. Try typing a phone number into google. Go ahead, try it. Google has improved in some regards. I recall having to look through 3-4 pages to find a decent result in some queries a few years ago. They're usually on the first or second page now, but there are still these worthless results that end up in the 1-3 spot. That's enough evidence for me that they need expert intervention, not algorithmic guessing.
IvyMike 14y ago
Oh god, I've completely forgotten about expertsexchange! The horror, the horror. This product shutdown is a little surprising, because it makes Google's core product worse and less useful. Maybe they're confident their current ranking algorithms get rid of all the crap content farm sites now, and as someone else mentioned, this appears to be the case. But I suspect they'll enjoy a resurgence someday. Ugh.
- alwaysdoit 14y ago
  Just imagine if you had gotten one from a non-expert.
magicalist 14y ago
> This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again The blocked sites list hasn't worked for like a year now, so if you haven't been seeing experts exchange links, you aren't going to now, either. I noticed when w3schools starting showing back up last spring or so, but I haven't seen experts exchange in results for a long time (or at least, I've seen them at a low enough volume that I can't recall any now). Now the only somewhat equivalent experience is quora results, as others have said.
jrockway 14y ago
I'm an engineer at Google. 20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time. Effective 20% projects, in my opinion, are projects that add something new to an existing product and whose maintenance costs are low enough to be absorbed by the project's primary contributors. I've been working on Android lint checks recently: it's something that's self-contained, can be done without interfering with my 80% project, and won't make extra work for the project's main maintainers. (It's also open source, so it can't be canceled. Hah!) It's also worth pointing out that not all 20% projects at Google are going to be visible outside of Google. I spent my first couple quarters at Google working on maintaining the internal Emacs extensions and user-base; most of my time was spent answering questions on the mailing list. This isn't going to result in Google Maps or Gmail, but it is still needs to be done. If you want to do something with more public impact, I think you should work towards making that idea your 80% project. Get buy-in from your peers, write a design doc or description of the product, and talk to people who work on similar projects. Once you have a team ready to work on the project, a good design, and clear criteria for success, it shouldn't be hard to become a "real" project. (I've succeeded in doing this for an internal utility I wanted to write. I wrote a design doc, got some feedback from my peers, and asked my manager for a quarter to work on it, and did. Now it exists and has users!)
- CyberDroiD 14y ago
  Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality. It can sometimes be a challenge, but that is the fun part, not the hard part. However this explains why Google seems so abrasive... they think it's hard!
  - hahainternet 14y ago
    > Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. > If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality. You're replying to jrockway. Perhaps you could curb your arrogance. Programming is indeed an extremely hard topic filled with compromises and tradeoffs that are often unattractive. Picking the correct solution that fulfills time, effort, complexity constraints is why some people are paid so well.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ollysb 14y ago

I think they were just crowdsourcing the pruning effort. I don't have experts exchange blocked and I haven't seen it appear in my results for months.

brokentone 14y ago
Interesting theory, and genius if that's what they were doing with it. However, pulling it back off the market makes it look as though they failed at this.
- zem 14y ago
  or that they succeeded well enough that they no longer need additional data. note from the description of the panda algorithm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda] "Google Panda affects the ranking of an entire site or a specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site."

deelowe 14y ago

Experts exchange stopped showing up in the results back when Google released the new indexing engine over a year ago. You should be fine.

brokentone 14y ago
Thanks for the update! I'm less concerned now.
eknkc 14y ago
I still see it sometimes. Meanwhile, Quora is in the works to become next EE...
- evilduck 14y ago
  Already is. I noticed the Google Blocklist was broken explicitly because I was trying to remove Quora from my results. Quora is another example of a company/site imploding.
- polynomial 14y ago
  I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?
  - calebegg 14y ago
    They seem to be showing up for me. I don't have any recent organic examples, but here's query for one of the most popular threads, and the quora thread is the first result: https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+habit+of+procrastinating https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab... What do you mean by "private site"? The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers unless you log in. That really sucks.
    - pyre 14y ago
      EE never hid their answers. They were only obfuscated. First[1] they made it look like the page ended, but you could scroll further and get the answers. Later, I saw that they had a section that looks like the answers, but all of the text was blurred. Again, if you scrolled past the 'end of the site' you could still get to the answers. Looks like Quora gives you the question, and the first answer, but all other answers are Private-Only. [1] I think that in the beginning they may have really hidden their answers, but were forced to actually show them by Google.
      - codezero 14y ago
maqr 14y ago
But somehow Quora still has first page results.

malandrew 14y ago

I just want to see w3schools stop showing up at the top of results before MDN, which is a much higher quality resource.

eknkc 14y ago
You're right. I have an Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com http://www.alfredapp.com if using mac) shortcut to search google with "mdn" suffix.

philwelch 14y ago

According to various sources, Larry Page had occasion to speak with Steve Jobs and ask his advice--in general terms--a few months before Jobs' death. Jobs originally wasn't inclined to give Page his time (he was still bitter about Android) but felt that, as he had reached out to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs himself, he should pay it forward. Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important products and prune the rest. It appears Google is now following this advice.

hackernewbie 14y ago
Works great for a company that risks generating a lot of noise to consumers (i.e. producing and marketing physical products). But for Google it's pervasiveness and breadth of services were part of the appeal, it's not like it's minor products interfered with the major parts of the company nor cost them much to maintain.
- ams6110 14y ago
  The niche services that have been killed were (by definition) used by small groups, groups which tend to be over-represented here and on other tech-oriented outlets. Even a service like Reader was something that only a small number of people used (compared to e.g. gMail). One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.
- philwelch 14y ago
  I agree that Jobs' advice was a mismatch for Google. Trying a million things and seeing what sticks, like an incubator, is a better idea for Google. The problem is when that turns into Microsoft-esque trend chasing. But that only happens when upper management focuses on trend chasing. Otherwise they just end up as passing experiments.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago

andrewtbham 14y ago

larry page is trying to make the company more focussed (as per the advice of steve jobs). eric schmidt had a very different and unfocused philosophy. besides google reader, most of the cuts have been good or just not important. I always felt like this feature was a reaction to blekko search engine, and not very interesting. curiously i found myself not wanting to block crappy sites like ehow just cuz they might have a good page and would rather just trust google.

just2n 14y ago
I can provide evidence that this is a horrible idea. Try typing a phone number into google. Go ahead, try it. Google has improved in some regards. I recall having to look through 3-4 pages to find a decent result in some queries a few years ago. They're usually on the first or second page now, but there are still these worthless results that end up in the 1-3 spot. That's enough evidence for me that they need expert intervention, not algorithmic guessing.

IvyMike 14y ago

Oh god, I've completely forgotten about expertsexchange! The horror, the horror. This product shutdown is a little surprising, because it makes Google's core product worse and less useful. Maybe they're confident their current ranking algorithms get rid of all the crap content farm sites now, and as someone else mentioned, this appears to be the case. But I suspect they'll enjoy a resurgence someday. Ugh.

alwaysdoit 14y ago
Just imagine if you had gotten one from a non-expert.

magicalist 14y ago

> This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again The blocked sites list hasn't worked for like a year now, so if you haven't been seeing experts exchange links, you aren't going to now, either. I noticed when w3schools starting showing back up last spring or so, but I haven't seen experts exchange in results for a long time (or at least, I've seen them at a low enough volume that I can't recall any now). Now the only somewhat equivalent experience is quora results, as others have said.

jrockway 14y ago

I'm an engineer at Google. 20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time. Effective 20% projects, in my opinion, are projects that add something new to an existing product and whose maintenance costs are low enough to be absorbed by the project's primary contributors. I've been working on Android lint checks recently: it's something that's self-contained, can be done without interfering with my 80% project, and won't make extra work for the project's main maintainers. (It's also open source, so it can't be canceled. Hah!) It's also worth pointing out that not all 20% projects at Google are going to be visible outside of Google. I spent my first couple quarters at Google working on maintaining the internal Emacs extensions and user-base; most of my time was spent answering questions on the mailing list. This isn't going to result in Google Maps or Gmail, but it is still needs to be done. If you want to do something with more public impact, I think you should work towards making that idea your 80% project. Get buy-in from your peers, write a design doc or description of the product, and talk to people who work on similar projects. Once you have a team ready to work on the project, a good design, and clear criteria for success, it shouldn't be hard to become a "real" project. (I've succeeded in doing this for an internal utility I wanted to write. I wrote a design doc, got some feedback from my peers, and asked my manager for a quarter to work on it, and did. Now it exists and has users!)

CyberDroiD 14y ago
Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality. It can sometimes be a challenge, but that is the fun part, not the hard part. However this explains why Google seems so abrasive... they think it's hard!
- hahainternet 14y ago
  > Programming, maintenance, scaling, etc, is not hard. > If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality. You're replying to jrockway. Perhaps you could curb your arrogance. Programming is indeed an extremely hard topic filled with compromises and tradeoffs that are often unattractive. Picking the correct solution that fulfills time, effort, complexity constraints is why some people are paid so well.