
Google SMS search has been shut down - duked
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/yKG7BGro7QQ/ntAXQWWKj70J
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sgromoll
Hello 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/>

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

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film42
Sometimes when a google service shuts down I think, "Hmm, what did that one
do? I don't remember hearing about that."

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hmsimha
I 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.

~~~
Kylekramer
Sure, 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.

~~~
hmsimha
I'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
Plenty of stats around. The trend is fairly clear. Mobile data is the future
and almost the present, even in developing countries:
[http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-
mobile...](http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-
stats/b#mobilebroadband)

~~~
hmsimha
On the google products forum, someone mentioned that in India, everyone was
using this service because it's fairly uncommon to have a data plan. The study
you just linked seems to show monthly 3G access at about 8% for urban India.
Which seems like a pretty clearcut minority to me.

~~~
Kylekramer
It isn't about the present numbers, it is about where the numbers are going.
Google may have a mission statement of "organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful", but clearly that require a company
to make decisions. A lot of people would find it useful to have Google
physically mail them info, but that isn't efficient or the way of the future.

I suspect a lot of people who are lamenting the "loss" of this service haven't
used it. I have. It is better than nothing, but it is a hack designed for a
world that isn't going to be around for long. If I was a Google shareholder,
I'd be questioning them wasting any resources on it.

~~~
hmsimha
Whether or not that is the trend, it still sucks for the people who used it
daily, such as myself. Your reasoning is sound, but that doesn't mean those of
us who used it shouldn't be upset, or that those who no have need for it and
possibly didn't even know about it until now shouldn't agree that it sounded
useful.

I'm not trying to say google owes it to us to keep the service running or
anything like that. They're a business and it's their prerogative to make
decisions like this. I'm reminded of a Wayne Gretsky quote though, roughly "I
don't skate to where the puck is, but where it's going to be." And that's
solid reasoning. But from my perspective, with a team as strong as Google's,
it wouldn't hurt them to leave a player where the puck is either.

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lobotryas
Wow, 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? :)

~~~
Centigonal
Let's extend that idea to it's logical extent:
<http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns>

~~~
jerf
I 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>

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tobyjsullivan
I 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
Orrrr the non sinister explanation, that few use it any more.

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gkop
People 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>). As additional services shut down due to
increasing traffic, that traffic will move to the surviving services, until
they all shut down.

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jstanley
Are Google having cashflow problems?

How come they're shutting down so many of their services?

~~~
rm999
>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
This: _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
There'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...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&fstype=ii&ei=ed6PUbDGDYat0AGfBw)

Digital advertising just happens to be a very good industry to be in right
now.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The 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)

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espo
If 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?

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sbuccini
It 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.

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brudgers
I don't know which is more depressing, Google ruthlessly killing off a
valuable service, or people being astonished by their doing so.

~~~
myko
> 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.

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onster
Google's new mission statement: "organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful for a few years."

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jonmarkgo
As 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>

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samfisher83
How expensive can this be to run. They should just leave it up.

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aioprisan
I think this has something to do with the fact that you can't monetize and
sell ads through SMS.

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Kiro
What did Google SMS Search return exactly when you sent a text?

~~~
hmsimha
See my response here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688008>

