> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine
Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product...
EDIT:
Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0]
[0] https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...
>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product
WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.
There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.
It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).
I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting.
Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.
>> NDA
Non-disclosure agreement
Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save.
So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked.
I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
I disagree. I am happy the Internet Archive are fighting the draconian copy right laws that exist.
But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well.
Obviously the law needs to be changed.
The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
I used cache a lot, not just to view sites, but see the text versions of PDF and Word documents. RIP.
I would presume Google still has all this data. They just will not let anyone else use it.
Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access?
Google wants it to be more difficult to notice rewrites? Journalists to often have found valuable information with it?
I feel like the internet archive has taken a lot of that sort of use off of Google.
Unrelated: Google should probably think about a sizable donation to the Internet archive.
Some kind of collaboration appears to be happening between the two https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...
On a unrelated note, could IA be charging companies training AI for access to an API with all thier data, or a enormous data dump?
Presumably historical context is quite useful for so e cases and if they can access new content like books etc then that'd be another benifit.
It is a win win for site owners who currently have everyone and thier dog crawling thier site at the moment.
I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm pretty sure it's been years since I have seen a Google result which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.
One fewer reason to use Google search. Solid effort killing the money printer all around.
One more reason to not use Google search, I don't remember when it was the last time I used it, perhaps like twelve years ago.
Do any other versions provide cached versions of the pages they crawl? Far too many sites preform shinanigins based on geoip/ua.
Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and BraveSearch, please provide cache the pages you crawl and make them available to your users.
Sadly, not knowing what used to be, erases history.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Ah the memories! I remember in my starting years. I was migrating a WordPress to new server. The db backup got corrupted in the process. Google cache helped me restore the blog entries. Crazy days!
This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your RAG?
The answer could be to push users to their AI offerings, or possibly due to bots scraping up the cached data for their own AI models, where Google wasn't making a profit off providing the data. Most likely the feature wasn't used enough for them to care, and they couldn't find a way to monetize it to make it worth keeping around.
Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons. I'm guessing it's still available internally, along with snapshots going far, far back in time.
> Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons
This could be due to site owners contacting the IA and requesting their site be permanently removed from the archive. It's not as easy as pressing a button, but it's not difficult to have your site removed.
I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. It's more likely that the blacklist is a voluntary opt-in thing...
Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.
If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have always been able to remove their own content from Wayback Machine.
That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
What was the article? Is this in Pak?
That’s sad. I liked that feature a lot.
> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found.
My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.
> will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found
About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to.
The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior.
Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway.
This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
Google allowed sites to disable caching since forever. They could also serve the full content to Google's bots, Google publishes their IP ranges.
Who's taking odds on when they shut down search?
Can someone ELI5 what google cache was and why it was important? Was it essentially a wayback machine alternative? People are upset about its removal; curious to understand why.
You could access a snapshot of the page that was taken when google was indexing it. It is helpful if the site content changed or was removed shortly after google indexed it. This often lead to wrong search result preview texts which you could still find in the cache. The internet archive has a different focus and maybe you won't find the missing information that google has indexed there.
Right, that was the real value of the feature: you got to see what Google saw or thought it saw. Plenty of sites serve different things to Googlebot and the Google cache could often help untangle that mess.
The question is, what is not dead in Google?
Ads of course.
I hardly use Google search anymore. I think Google search wil also be dead soo .
For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere.
Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes.
Unfortunately, Google's time is over.
I really don’t understand killing this useful feature. Between this and the search results being bad, I don’t have much of a reason to visit Google anymore.
What were they thinking?!
quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.
I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.
Wasn't that NOARCHIVE?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...
I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems to be the case though because the cached versions would often contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use this trick to read any nikkei article.
Nah, it's not a Google thing although Google honored it. Here's a reference to the Internet Archive using it:
https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta...
I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.
You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
The least they could do is financially and perhaps operationally support The Internet Archive instead
Many years ago Google Cache once saved a site I used to maintain/own, classic funny story, I accidentally deleted the production database when I was trying migrate it, but luckily all the data to recreate the latest posts (the most important for this japanese music-downloads-links WordPress site) was stored all in HTML attributes and some tags, so I created a script to scrap it all from Google Cache and recreated the DB as best as I could.
Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)"
The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99.
I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.
The real question is why they'd have to be aware.
It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant provider of email/office SaaS.
But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the institional momentum is just so huge that it's very likely Google simply doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little incentive to behave differently they may actually have an atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be important, even if they were aware of cultural momentum shifts and were willing/able to persuade others at Google to change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to learn?
They'd have to be aware because people have gotten wary of anything new from the company, due to the fears it'll be killed in a year or two. That's not a huge issue right now (since Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Docs, etc are huge), but it does make it more difficult for them to compete if the technological landscape changes and leaves them behind.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
It's a mistake that's made over and over again in tech. Back when Atari was printing money in the late 70s and early 80s the leadership and marketing people literally didn't know what to do that would help or hurt their business. Literally anything they did brought in more profits than they knew what to do with.
It caused them to make wild mistakes that jeopardized the long term viability of the company like milking their core product well after it had served its time in the market and neglecting, shutting down, or even warehousing everything else (sound familiar?).
It took some really forceful misunderstanding of their marketspace by clueless executives to finally bring Atari down and have it sold off for parts. And that's where Google's fate diverges from the historic lesson, Google won't die because its stuff its sales channels full of more hardware than they can sell (tying up every dollar in the company). Google will die because it's core product, ad placement, is become less valuable, causing the company to optimize trying to capture that main source of revenue -- which is realized in a total lack of strategy to build literally any other business.
It matters because the HN crowd maybe small when it comes consumer products , but is a dominant factor for cloud purchases.
Having been burnt too many times with Google products[1] I try not use their offerings on the cloud many decision makers are here who will worry about similar issues.
If Google wants to be serious about Cloud then they need to be serious about long term support.
Microsoft in the win 3 /9x days till even win 7 was exceptionally consistent about ABI support even adding specific behaviors to support a single binary to make sure upgrades just worked. That kind of culture was a key factor that made developers want to develop on their platforms
—-
[1] just this week having to start work on upcoming firebase dynamic link deprecation.
While google had given a long lead time and announced the sunsetting years ahead , I still don’t have to worry about similar issues on AWS nearly as often.
Google cache had what, 15 years of support, with no promises ever?
I think of all the google.products, that's pretty good.
Inbox still hurts though, but not as much as google music
It is hard to recommend Google Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614795
I’ve been trying to make this point here on HN and elsewhere for quite a while now, but you said it so much more eloquently than me!
I see this as a variant of the tragedy of the commons: in this case it is the reputation and market share of Google Search.
Each individual at Google is incentivised to feed their own cow… err… career at the expense of the commons: Google’s reputation.
Inevitably this will destroy Google, but this will take many years of accumulated damage to build up to a catastrophic point.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually
and then suddenly.”Honestly, who is going to be comfortable staking their name on adopting Google's AI offerings? I have talked so many people out of wasting their effort supporting it simply by pointing to all the rug pulls Google has done.
Can you describe this more? Curious as I was looking at their offerings.
For starters there is this:
Was looking for something AI specific. Those are B2B services from their cloud.
I'm pretty sure people who used google's web cache comprised a tiny fraction of one percent of their entire user base, and this move doesn't even put the tiniest ding in their brand.
Exactly this.
It was a fairly hidden piece of functionality that a tiny proportion of people ever used -- of course, a higher proportion of HN users, but still.
Their brand is unchanged.
Not just HN. In my autocracy every housewife knew about Google cache — it was the easiest way to read information the government doesn't want you to read, and it was free and always available unlike many blocked VPNs (and what shady proxy companies call "VPNs").
I wonder if this is the reason Google killed the product? I.e., pressure from autocratic regimes so that they can control information better.
It adds up over time. I used and liked Google domains for a bunch of websites, and was disappointed when that was axed and all my domains moved to squarespace (and have since transferred them all out). I used the Google podcast app on my phone, and that was killed and replaced by YouTube music which is a horrible replacement.
I used to buy in heavily to the Google ecosystem and trust it as a pretty solid go to option for anything they offered, now I'd be really hesitant to use it for anything critical. I have even been wondering if my longstanding gmail email address will someday be a liability.
Those two examples were probably smaller services but had their effects on different populations. When you add up all the things that have been ended by Google it can really contribute to their overall brand image. Some things can trickle down from more technical users to less technical. I think chrome was first adopted by a highly tech literate population before breaking into the mainstream, and if that population starts to mistrust Google it could hurt them in the long run.
I think there has been a pretty major shift in Google culture and product strategy and I'm not a fan of it.
It became apparent they are a zombie company once I realized I no longer put any brainspace into learning new functionality/tools Google offered. They are a corporation living off the corpse of who they have been. Total zombie company that doesn't realize it's dead yet.
What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life? Instead of adding Google Quickshare to share files from my PC to Android I use Microsoft's Phone Link. That is the first time in my life I've picked a Microsoft product over a Google one. It also just works better and doesn't require I have bluetooth enabled on both devices.
Yes. They are the new Oracle. And like Oracle, they won't care how much their brand stinks like a fish market on a hot summer's day because they'll still be raking in enough cash not to care.
I recently started with YouTubeTV, and its great. And Waymo is coming to my town soon. So I agree, lots of abandoned products, but still quite a few good ones.
Mozilla via Firefox thought the same thing. They removed feature after feature, each feature only used by a tiny fraction of a percent.
But all those features were what drew users, power users especially. And users each had their own featured reasons to love Firefox.
Now look at them. Most used browser to nothing.
There are other reasons too, but what Firefox did was remove what was special about them.
> Most used browser to nothing.
Feel free to criticize Mozilla all you like, but this is a prime example of myopic tech-bubble thinking that is being decried elsewhere in this thread. Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome for free on what was then the most valuable web real estate in the world (the Google home page), then because they paid software installers to use dark patterns to automatically install Chrome and set it as the default browser without the user's consent, and then because they optimized all of Google's popular properties to work best in Chrome and only begrudgingly in other browsers, and then because they shipped it as the default browser on the OS that Google controls. There's not a single thing that Mozilla could have done to stop Chrome, short of making their own phone OS where they could ship Firefox as the default, which they did in fact attempt.
I do agree that perspective is more accurate; Chrome was always going to be huge with a combination of Google's development effort and advertising. However Mozilla's leadership have done an unimpressive job. They took a large amount of money from Google, decided that their vision of how the internet should work was identical to Google's, then converged Firefox to being an inferior Chrome clone. Brave does a better job of articulating a different vision of the web than Firefox and it is a Chrome fork; the situation is a bit ridiculous [0, 1]. And Brave's crypto scheme, while maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, is a radical re-imagination of how the web could be commercialised. So there is clearly room to imagine an internet other than the one Google wants where everyone has Google Ads.
So yes, Google was going to win the fight Mozilla picked, but Mozilla picked a losing strategy.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome
Yes, indeed. This may or may not have been wrong of Google, however this is also called "competition". And what did Mozilla do?
It flinched.
Many users loved Firefox, and disliked that Chrome had barely any ability to customize anything when released. It was literally years before you could change even the most basic things about the interface. When released, almost nothing could be configured about it, and it was a far cry from Firefox's ability to give the user what they wanted.
Firefox's response to Chrome's minor speed improvements? Was to literally begin a campaign to become the enemy. Firefox devs worked diligently to make Firefox a second rate clone of Chrome. They removed features, configuration, the ability to modify the interface, and more.
Mozilla could have so easily kept all that configurability, its strong point, its unique factor, but instead panicked. And in doing so it rendered itself incapable of competing on any footing.
Put another way, yes Google had vast resources. Yet this is precisely why you never compete on the same footing as them. You instead compete on what they do not have.
And that was the ability to theme Firefox, to configure it as you wanted, to turn off features you did not want, and more. Chrome had none of this initially. And Google is literally famous for, and incapable of listening to users. They're not built for it. Mozilla was.
And they threw all those strengths away, the only way they could compete with Chrome.
So yes, there were things they could have done. And yes, endless people told them that in bug reports, in emails to them, and more. If anyone's thinking here is myopic (great personal attack, btw), it was Mozilla's.
Death by thousand paper cuts in action.
I love Firefox (fork) it is my only browser but you can see the long term trend and I do wonder if it will even be a thing in a decades time. Unless there is a sudden shift towards it, is will eventually be relegated to the last of the most devoted geeks as we watch it wither away at the hands of the tech giants running the net.
A big thing was when they cut the Servo team that was when I knew they had sort of given up on trying to push forward but merely follow.
The saddest day will be when Firefox switches to a blink engine
I have an original Chromecast and it still works, though pairing it with a new TV is a bit of a pain.
The new Google TV is more like a smart TV without the TV. It has apps you install. It's much more complex and not the same thing at all. I was disappointed.
But then again every company discontinues products. I don't see that as a breach of trust. It's making up a promise they never made and criticizing them for it.
Lucky you.
I've got a couple nest protects that need to be put into a shallow grave.
They've kinda mucked up the rest of the nest ecosystem.
A pox on google.
I think you can just ignore the apps and cast like you’re used to, if you don’t care about the extra functionality.
(But in that case, I don’t see why you bought one in the first place.)
Yes, casting from your phone still works. However, it requires a Google login to set up and automatically downloads a bunch of apps you probably don't want if all you care about is playing movies and YouTube videos from your phone. I suppose you could create an account just for this, but you really shouldn't need an account at all.
It was a gift for a relative: a "Chromecast with Google TV." I didn't know what it really was when I bought it. Taking "Chromecast" out of the name makes sense.
The original concept was great, but I guess it doesn't sell anymore?
The original concept was great for some things, sure.
I bought an OG Chromecast over a decade ago. It was a one-trick pony: Push "cast" button on pocket computer, and whatever I was doing there would show up on the BFT.
Which is great, you know, for a person who lives alone and never has visitors: One can select an item from the slick interface provided by the service they subscribe to on their amazing personal computing device and it appears magically on the big screen. The control buttons are there on the pocket computer, too. It Just Works.
However, it is an awful experience for someone who wishes to watch a film together with others: My personal pocket computer is not really set up to be shared with others (and the live screencast function of Chromecast, while functional, has really high latency for interactive tasks).
And if someone else wants to pick something to watch using their own personal pocket computer, then they can of course do so -- but theirs is also not meant to be a shared experience, and they won't be able to use the services that I pay to use in my home.
So fine. A film is selected, however that is done, and it is playing. But it's time to pause it so someone can use the bathroom. Do I use my phone for my Chromecast for the movie my friend picked on their phone? I already had to hide the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Or do I have my friend fumble around with this potentially-unfamiliar interface on their own (locked) pocket computer to pause it? What if they stepped away? Do I find the Home app on my own pocket computer, open it, find the devices page, find the appropriate Chromecast device, and then finally fucking pause it? (Fuck you. I just want to go take a fucking piss.)
Back then, it was a much better experience in my household to use a PS3 for streaming: It had a regular remote control that -- as a design intent -- anyone could pick up and operate. Browsing possible selections was done on the BFT that was visible to all interested parties. My roommate didn't get a notification on their phone that encouraged them fuck with me from a different area of the house. It was a much better experience for those who didn't live a life of absolute solitude.
Today, it's still that way -- except nowadays I have [what is sometimes referred to as] a GCWGTV. It can behave like an OG Chromecast (what UI???), or it can behave like a human-centric streaming device with its own GUI and dedicated physical remote control that anyone can pick up and use, browsing Netflix or Plex or whatever in a manner very similar to what we were doing on a PS3 back in the day.
This works fine.
> I already hid the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Honestly that sounds far more like your roommate being an ass than some failure of the technology. If you had to tape over the IR sensor because your roommate kept blasting the IR power off signal for your TV, would you also blame the IR sensor?
Either way, my TV remotes which support CEC that have play/pause buttons on them can play/pause content on my OG chromecast.
When an IR remote starts putting notifications on any and every phone that happens to be on the network that let them very easily fuck up my streaming experience, then it may be possible to start drawing parallels. Until then, they're very different concepts.
(And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.)
Your roommate didn't even have to be on the same network to mess with the IR receiver. They just didn't think of it I guess.
I'd still say its 99% having a shitty roommate. I don't know why you'd excuse their shit behavior on having a button to do it.
> And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.
Eh. I've had a few dozen AV setups of "moderate" complexity (multiple game consoles/streaming boxes, AV receiver, BD player, TV) and never really had bad experiences. Often things just work when I've turned them on. And honestly most of the time with things running my OG Chromecasts its the only actual device on the setup (a stand-alone TV mounted someplace like in the garage or kitchen or patio).
Did the TV B Gone manifest itself from nothing and present that manifestation on my asshole roommate's personal pocket computer with zero action on their part?
No?
Then we're done here.
Mine worked great. Had Chromecasts in every room and a few Google Home minis. Anyone in the house could just say "Hey Google, play [WhatEverTheFuckTheyWant] from [AnyStreamingServiceIHave] on [TheTVOfTheirChoice]" it really was great, but for some reason it stopped working most of the time about 18 months and has continually degraded.
I can see how that works for you, but it’s a lot simpler for us. If I picked the movie then I pause it when someone asks. If my wife picked the movie then she pauses it.
With a Real Remote Control (that nobody owns except for the coffee table that nobody owns): Anyone involved in a group viewing can just push the pause button when that is useful for one or more members of that group.
Nobody's locked-down personal pocket computer needs to be involved at all for this most mundane task.
Simplicity.
I have several Chromecasts in my TVs. Keeping them paired with mobile devices has become a nightmare. They frequently disconnect, often immediately after queuing videos. They never used to behave this way
The silver lining is that I have been finding some better alternatives to both Chromecast and YouTube. I have some Amazon Firesticks with Kodi installed that are pointed at my media-filled NAS, including videos I fetched previously with yt-dlp
I am also considering moving everything over to something like Intel PC sticks and possibly running Kodi off of those eventually. Then I can have all of the smart features I need without any ads or without any of the devices obsoleting themselves beyond my control
I've run Kodi for a while, raspberry pis and fire sticks mostly. Right now the best setup I have is on old Chromeboxes running libreelec or retroelec if I want gaming. It's pretty great. Chromebox G1 is like max $50 or less. They are way faster than any non X86 based hardware I've tried. The only downside is the lack of HDMI-CEC so I have to use either my phone, a gaming controller or some sort of Bluetooth remote to control it. I have installed Bliss OS on some Chromeboxes and it works well but haven't tried running Kodi on top of it. Might work well if I need access to any specific apps.
I've not been so lucky. Google went into partnership with Asus years ago and released the Nexus player, which I had. An expensive streaming player that within a year bricked itself due to Google's update. Many people were upset and when asked for support on the official forums, Google said it was in Asus' hands and of course Asus said the same of Google. I checked for updates at least a year thereafter but there was no fix, the thing was hard-bricked and hundreds of people had useless hockey pucks. Never again, Google.
Aww man, I worked on the chromecast SoC. It was a... difficult product. If there was a more perfect example of a product being killed by penny pinching, I can't think of one. It just didn't have enough flash for anything but a super cut down android. We had to drop multilib - the SoC and everything supported 64bit, just there wasn't enough space for the libraries. And the cheapest, bargin-basement flash as well - causing so many to be bricked trying to update. Plus 1gb ram, when even entry level phones were shipping with 2gb - just a couple of 4k framebuffers and the video decode reference frames meant there was pretty much nothing left for the apps themselves. So 1080p was it's limit despite having a capable video decoder and output.
And for ages afterwards they would use it as a reference device for google TV and testing for play store certification - just as they were pushing 64-bit only as a valid app path. So many things were only missing from the google tv play store for years afterwards because they just wouldn't function on those things.
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
Their finance bros don't care about anything they can't measure. Mission accomplished as far as they're concerned.
I'm aware of Google's history of shutting down services... but...
> And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
Will you have no trouble buying a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick though?
Those are also paper weights once the company decides to stop supporting them - and I'm not aware of any consumer electronics that allows you to install your own software on it.
Seems like a strange swipe at Google, even though your complaints apply to all of these devices regardless of brand.
For what it's worth - Google's latest phones, Pixel 9, boast 7 years of updates and support.
I think GP's point was specifically Google's famous history of starting projects and then shutting them down within a few years. Old Rokus still work. My Roku 3600 is eight years old.
My old Roku is now so sluggish and slow, it's a paper weight and I had to buy a new one.
All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable. GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite updates forever? Zero.
Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name. None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google kills things all the time" complaint.
If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's about legitimate things.
My Chromecast is 11 years old and still works fine. Sometimes YouTube thinks it can try playing back the higher bitrate 4k version of a video and it'll get choppy but I've never had issues with 1080p content.
My older Roku 2 is effectively unusable as most apps are just outrageously sluggish and videos often crash loading.
So do old Chromecast's.
The "Google Chromecast with Android TV" was a stick that was sold for $25, and it runs full Android TV. Google would have to abandon Android TV before it would be bricked.
They were sold as cable box replacements, running the YouTube TV app, rather than their ability to "cast" a phone screen to a TV.
It's called "Chromecast with Google TV" and it wasn't $25 until they made the cheaper version that doesn't do 4k.
Afaik Google TV is to Android TV what Pixel OS is to Android. Both the "Chromecast with Google TV" and the new "Google TV Streamer" are technically running "full Android TV".
Also they were sold mainly as a Roku/Fire stick competitor. Maybe they marketed it alongside YouTube TV but also there's a dedicated Netflix button on the remote.
Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia Shield. Really nice for travel.
> I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
You can install LineageOS on it today.
If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
I guess I'll have to buy the new Google TV Streamer because my previous Chromecast with Google TV 4K is now close to useless because of the lack of flash memory space after all the updates (despite it has a properly initialized USB drive connected via a powered USB-C hub, the most essential apps still require to be installed on the miniscule internal memory).
Why install apps? It's a Chromecast, just cast to it. I've been using Chromecasts as my primary vehicle on my TV for 8 years, and never needed to install any apps. It seems like it defeats the purpose of the main distinguishing characteristic.
I use it mostly for the "Google TV" part, not for the "Chromecast" part.
Before Stadia came out, I specifically warned people not to get invested in it because Google will just shut it down in 2 years, and all their games and save files will be gone forever. I was dead right, and as far as I'm concerned that's the final nail in the coffin for trusting anything Google makes. Anything that isn't a major core product will be abandoned immediately, it's just not worth the risk.
Unfortunately my TV is built on the Google TV OS, which probably means all smart features will be unusable in six months.
I think on Google announcement of discontinuing the original Chromecast they mentioned that Smart TVs are ubiquitous now, so this kinda doesn't speak well for their own Android TV like Chromecast 4 and forward being not discontinued too some time soon.
I agree, and also know my own personal bias against this particular company and whatever extent I might go to boycott or avoid its products are ultimately inconsequential to their bottom line.
My guess is it was a pain keeping up with the takedown requests.
Treat it like you do customer support and automate it. Or is that not allowed?
Do you actually want automated take-downs? Isn't that what people already complain the most about on YouTube?
No. But caching takedowns is not the same at all as YouTube takedowns. It’s very very clear who owns what data and after the takedown the site owner can modify the robots.txt and move on.
So yes, takedowns here are fine.
It’s a cache. Relatively speaking, who cares
It’s a cache; it was going to expire after a TTL anyway.
The amount of people using the feature was probably a rounding error for them. This is probably true for all the services they kill.
Removing the link to view cached content will do that.
s/people using the feature/profit left to extract/g
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
yes, of course. there will be outcry on eng-misc@ about it now it is in the news, and when it was first suggested that Search do this, someone will have found the plan and circulated it and it will be widely understood that this will be terrible for the brand of Google Search.
and then some exec will have written some nonsense email explaining how it was important as a cost saving measure and to secure "IP" for "pivot to AI" and that'll be the end of it.
it's extremely weird that HN posters assume Google employees aren't aware of things happening in the world, or don't predict the very obvious consequences of VP decisions.
bro, do yourself a favor, and go meditate in the google graveyard.
for how to do it, see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati
make sure to read it fully, including all the links, recursively.
and
https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?t=17516&start=20
https://damsara.org/interesting-new-findings/solitary-night-...
just kidding.
but really, do you seriously think that people in companies do things for any reason rather than their own benefit? do you? nope. nyet. nahi. nada. coz everyone is that way.
I don't buy google devices anymore except for Pixel phones. Everything else tends to be disappointing over time.
My Pixel keeps getting worse. The only thing I can count on assistant for is setting a timer (as long as I don't interact with the phone before it takes a pause then says 'starting now', because if I don't wait then apparently I didn't actually want the timer I just requested and it doesn't get set). So, I guess it's 50% on the timer thing too.
I guess that's another one to add to the list:
It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway.
Even YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS of all things is on there and they supported that system for two years longer than Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn't have been possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's also killed.
We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but dead is dead.
Agreed. Some other examples:
It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app) as two different things, despite the link to the news of their death being in the same article and Google shutting them at the same time.[0]
It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1] the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were videos that were only accessible from that app.
[0] https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/
[1] https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-a...
Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google’s decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo and today it is Google-Baz.
It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative. Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different feature set.
_Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a release, which means that's the point in time it started working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it stopped working.
Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about literal opposites there.
And surely the most popular video service no longer being available on the second most popular handheld console released since the launch of that service surely justifies at least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers things made not available by the owners of said video service, especially since it was a standalone product.
My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017) but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless if Google Toolbar gets a spot for being killed in 2021, long past it having any relevance whatsoever, I don't doubt that YouTube 3DS would be guaranteed a spot no matter how long Google kept it on life support.
I don't know why this is your hill to die on, but there's not really any ambiguity that Google killed Youtube 3DS. They issued an update so that it stopped working[1]. New 3DS software updates were still being issued up until April 20, 2024, and new 3DS hardware was still being sold when Google killed Youtube for Nintendo 3DS in September 2019.
Obviously there are good reasons why they did it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong on this list
[1] https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html
Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one gone, another one bites the dust.
This a shame. It's really annoying getting a Google result snippet that contains your search phrase, but when you click the link is nowhere to be found in the content of the page (e.g. because sever rendered differently for you than the crawl agent).
Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.
What was it?
Google would cache older versions of pages that it had crawled, and you were able to access this cache.
I'm pretty sure that Google's main business is cancelling products. Things like search and ads are just side gigs.
I was thinking today that companies like google don't understand the implication of losing or discarding a couple percent of their customers per year every year.
Nowadays my browser's home page is one of the LLMs. It's easier to get knowledge with an AI than the dead Internet to which Google contributed.
The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are finishing it off.
I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward, it's not like the world will remain static once most of the human written websites have shuttered.
Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of the first damage to the search result quality that they started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used to be done manually years before.
I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's search engine requires there to be content for them to index and send people to in order for their service to be useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites want google to send them traffic.
LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they don't get enough traffic anymore.
There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".
> send traffic to websites
Yup, mostly sponsored websites, thus killing the Internet. We have complained about this for at least a decade, we are tired too, thus moving to a better knowledge provider like the LLMs is a natural step.
A huge amount of links on HN are just the personal websites of some person expressing their views. Not infrequently these people show up in the comments to engage with people.
Bringing on HN specifically as an example is not serious.
Thinking LLMs are anyone's salvation in the fact of Dead Internet Theory has to most the most incomprehensible thing I've read on this site. Maybe ever.
Why?
So your LLM has an up to date cache of roughly all web pages in the world?
Given that the answer is inevitably going to be "no", why do you think this generic complaint is in any way relevant to the article?
To all, no. A summarized cache of the most important knowledge, yes!
Truthfully, that says a lot more about you/your searches than it does about Google. I almost never have questions where LLMs can actually give me a good answer, whereas Google usually has something for me. I have to sift through the dross, but it's still there.
They say books are even better, how big your books are is telling something about anyone?
Probably a lot fewer ads as well.
...FOR NOW