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Google SMS search has been shut down
- samfisher83 13y agoHow expensive can this be to run. They should just leave it up.
- jstanley 13y agoAre Google having cashflow problems? How come they're shutting down so many of their services?
- dmight 13y agoMy guess is Google is focusing more on a certain goal than having cash flow issues.
- duked 13y agoTo me it sounds more like they are shutting down services that can't be monetized :/
- ixtraz 13y agoLooks like it's a big chance to make a startup based on big-company closed service. E.g. Feedly is a good option.
- Kylekramer 13y agoOr services that have no future? SMS search is a dead man walking in 2013.
- glomph 13y agoNot in lots of countries.
- Kylekramer 13y agoNearly every single country is moving to smartphones. At wildly different rates and current penetration, but the vast majority of the world is going to be on smartphones in the near future. Companies who focus on the present and are obsessed with backward compatibility will inevitably find themselves behind more forward thinking companies.
- lukeschlather 13y agoEven in the US, data coverage isn't even to 50% yet. In the developing world, electricity coverage can't support phones with less than 1 week of battery life. Both of these things are hard technical problems and I don't see them being solved any time soon. Smartphones are promising, but they haven't proven themselves as reliable enough to properly replace dumber phones.
- objclxt 13y agoRevenue wise, there is still a lot of money to be made on SMS, even in countries like the US where smartphones are king. SMS aggregators and gateways still make significant amounts of money, and it's not decreasing.
- snowwrestler 13y agoGoogle is already one of the leading companies in the world at providing technologies for smartphones. Shutting down SMS search does not help them in that regard one bit. All it does it remove a useful service from the world. SMS access is useful regardless of whether your handset is smart or dumb. SMS traffic often gets through when data cannot, either because of signal strength or circuit capacity. I have successfully used Google SMS search from my smartphone when it could not load Google.com in the browser--once to find the nearest hospital when dealing with a dangerous medical situation on a hiking trip. Better hope the 3G/LTE coverage is better in the backcountry now, I guess. This is terribly short-sighted decision by Google.
- notatoad 13y agoit's a "dead man walking" everywhere. SMS has no future except death. in some regions that death will come later than others but that doesn't mean we're going to see a great SMS resurgence any time in the near future. nobody cancels their data plan and gets SMS instead.
- mtgx 13y agoGoogle "Babel" is coming. Maybe that's why. I also think Google's top executives have a certain vision about what apps they will need in the future, and where they are heading, and that doesn't include many of the more "random" projects that were built before.
- rm999 13y ago>Are Google having cashflow problems? Nope, they are more profitable than ever. My friend who works at Google explained to me that a big issue is maintenance. It's a tougher problem than it sounds because if an issue comes up someone needs to understand the codebase well. When a product is no longer worth the budget of full-time employees the best course of action is to kill the product.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThis: Nope, they are more profitable than ever. Goes hand in hand with "shutting down a lot of services" since rounded to the nearest billion dollars the only business Google has is search & display advertising, generally deleting anything else accretes positively to the bottom line :-)
- rm999 13y agoThere's some truth to that, but their profits are growing because their annual revenues are consistently and exponentially growing, not because their costs are going down: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&fstype=ii&ei=ed6PUbDGDYat0AGfBw https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&fstype=ii... Digital advertising just happens to be a very good industry to be in right now.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThe term you are looking for is efficiency which is the measure of how much of the business is dedicated to the parts that provide the revenue versus the parts that don't :-). I left Google a couple of years after Patrick Pichette joined. Patrick is a great guy and very focused on putting as much money as possible into the bank account (great for share holders, not so great for lifestyle benefits). But the point is that there is a target return on capital that every group is being held to and those that don't make the cut are being tossed. That helps the overall number get better (assuming those freed up resources either join more profitable projects or leave)
- ams6110 13y ago
- keeperofdakeys 13y agoThis seems to be a common theme after Larry Page took over as CEO. Instead of having lots of small, separate things, everything seems to be moving towards having less, but larger services. Probably one of the better examples is google+, along with google now. It will be interesting to see what Larry's end vision is.
- lobotryas 13y agoWow, from that thread the service looks very useful(even if you have a smartphone with data). Wish I knew about it before the shutdown. I guess such is life in the Googleverse now: if you're unprofitable then you're "distracting us from our core mission". Who wants to make bets on the next service(s) to bite the dust? :)
- mtgx 13y agoNever knew about it, either.
- Centigonal 13y agoLet's extend that idea to it's logical extent: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
- jerf 13y agoI looked in the original data set [1] to see if this was in there; unless "SMS" meant "SMS search", it may not be at all. If it isn't in there it would be interesting to put it in the model as it stands now and see what the model thinks of the probability of shutdown. [1]: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2013-google.csv http://www.gwern.net/docs/2013-google.csv
- notatoad 13y agoi can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not - are you honestly complaining that a service you didn't learn about until its shutdown is shutting down? especially a service based on a technology that is clearly not long for this world? of course things get shut down when they're unprofitable or not aligned with the business strategy. that is the most basic principle of running a business. google isn't running a charity to provide you with obscure and marginally useful services.
- jaytaylor 13y agoShameless plug: https://sendhub.com https://sendhub.com - a free business phone for calling and group texting
- sbuccini 13y agoIt seems to me that this service would be really, really handy in countries where Nokia bar phones are prevalent. I'd love to see how many people actually used this service in those areas, because it depriving those people of this service goes against Google's mission of providing the entire world with information.
- tobyjsullivan 13y agoI was always a huge evangelist for this service and it was incredibly useful to so many people I know. I'm both surprised and disappointed to see it go but I guess you can't serve ads via SMS (well, you can, but...).
- jamesaguilar 13y agoOrrrr the non sinister explanation, that few use it any more.
- hmsimha 13y agoI posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/ Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google responds "SMS search has been shutdown. You can continue to search the web at google.com on any device". This isn't exactly helpful for someone lost in an unfamiliar city without a smartphone or GPS.
- jfb 13y agoGoogle says their mission is one thing; their actions seem to point to another. Actions speak louder than words.
- Kylekramer 13y agoSure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.
- blackjack48 13y agoI wouldn't exactly refer to them as a "dying breed" quite yet. I recall seeing a statistic somewhere that in many developing countries, SMS adoption rates are still going up. There's still a prominent market for SMS search, just not necessarily the one that Google wants to serve.
- hmsimha 13y agoI'd like to know what you're basing this on. In the U.S. this may very well be true, though the fact still remains that lower-income people are less likely to have smartphones. But what about in developing nations?
- Kylekramer 13y ago
- film42 13y agoSometimes when a google service shuts down I think, "Hmm, what did that one do? I don't remember hearing about that."
- gkop 13y agoPeople with feature phones are still going to need to find info, and this move shifts the traffic onto services with less resources than Google (eg. https://twitter.com/Telefact https://twitter.com/Telefact). As additional services shut down due to increasing traffic, that traffic will move to the surviving services, until they all shut down.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 13y agoWhat did Google SMS Search return exactly when you sent a text?
- hmsimha 13y agoSee my response here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688008
- espo 13y agoIf there really is a market for this, it shouldn't be too hard to recreate with the help of twilio and google APIs. The problem is getting paid, maybe you could charge a monthly fee or the users could agree to receive 1 ad for every X searches?
- aioprisan 13y agoI think this has something to do with the fact that you can't monetize and sell ads through SMS.
- brudgers 13y agoI don't know which is more depressing, Google ruthlessly killing off a valuable service, or people being astonished by their doing so.
- myko 13y ago> killing off a valuable service, Which valuable service is being killed off here? I'd never heard of this before. Doesn't look like it is used very much.
- onster 13y agoGoogle's new mission statement: "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful for a few years."
- sgromoll 13y agoHello all, I'm CEO of DOTGO, which provides access to the internet using SMS. Good news: you can still access google's search service using the short code DOTCOM (368266). Just text "google" + your search term to DOTCOM (368266). You can actually access a bunch of websites by texting the website's domain name to DOTCOM (368266). For example, try "cnn" or "nytimes" or "yahoo" or "gmail". And if you have your own website, you can use DOTGO to make your own website SMS-accessible for free. Visit our website dotgo.com to find out how or check out this doc: http://dotgo.com/Support/Documentation/doc0001.1.0/ http://dotgo.com/Support/Documentation/doc0001.1.0/ I can't guarantee how long we'll able to provide access, but we will as long as we're technically able! Stefan Gromoll [first initial dot lastname] @ dotgo.com Co-Founder & CEO DOTGO 200 Varick St. #805 New York, NY 10014 Text "dotgo" to DOTCOM (368266) to find out more
- jonmarkgo 13y agoAs per some of the suggestions here, just published a tutorial on building your own Google SMS search with Twilio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5700331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5700331