
Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018 - happy-go-lucky
https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html
======
Fej
I wonder if it would be worth the money for Google to keep services like this
one running, just so that people (especially enterprise customers) don't lose
faith in Google's competency with regard to long-term product support.

Although if you ask around here, you'd probably not find much faith for them
to save.

~~~
d0vs
I honestly don't think people outside the HN echo chamber care that much.

~~~
ancarda
Problem is, people on HN are making decisions and building tools and startups.
If everyone loses faith in Google, we'll stop using their platforms and tools
which translates to loss of money.

The only example I can give is at my day job, I built a backup system that
uses Azure blob storage because I actually trust Microsoft more than Google.

I wonder how many other people have a "anyone but Google" approach? It's not
just cancelling services, it's the churn in APIs; they seem to be less stable
than products from almost any other company.

~~~
vinceguidry
The HN crowd is absolutely _tiny_ , compared to the entire development
ecosystem. And a lot of us aren't even shot-callers.

~~~
ancarda
Are you suggesting there's zero people outside HN who avoid Google products
due to legitimate concerns of long-term availability?

~~~
vinceguidry
You should address that question to d0vs, as he is the one who made that
point.

But now that I have a chance to think about it, I can see his point. Most
companies don't really take that particular risk into account and just kick
the problem down the road. If you tried raising it as an issue, you'd get
responses ranging from 'sure, figure out a way to value the risk and we'll add
it into the model', to 'who cares really?'.

------
ipsum2
Note that Google custom site search is still available:
[https://cse.google.com/cse](https://cse.google.com/cse)

The main difference seems to be that enterprise has custom branding and is ad-
free.

~~~
mc32
Since they pushed Excite out of this business, who will take up the slack?

~~~
ethana
Stucked in time: [http://www.excite.com/](http://www.excite.com/)

~~~
kristopolous
look at the source. Something makes me think this will work in Netscape 4.

edit: nope. [http://imgur.com/a/Jt38q](http://imgur.com/a/Jt38q) not really.

edit 2: Here's a HP B-series PA-RISC from my closet running actual vintage
NS-4, also no,
[http://i.imgur.com/tt7AYqj.png](http://i.imgur.com/tt7AYqj.png) (the top
window is a search for the term "cat")

Google however, _almost still works_
[http://i.imgur.com/kdTd1AU.png](http://i.imgur.com/kdTd1AU.png) ... I give
them an A. hn and kernel.org get a security algorithm error, reddit gets an
i/o error as does craigslist and yahoo. wiki.c2.com has a perpetual spinner.
netbsd here makes me sad to be such a fanboy:
[http://i.imgur.com/RxedDF6.png](http://i.imgur.com/RxedDF6.png)

[http://gnu.org](http://gnu.org) is totally acceptable, even in Netscape 3!
[http://i.imgur.com/RImHQjM.png](http://i.imgur.com/RImHQjM.png)

[http://fsf.org](http://fsf.org) errors at an appropriate place:
[http://i.imgur.com/g8TF8Uc.png](http://i.imgur.com/g8TF8Uc.png) but after
that is usable.

[http://berkshirehathaway.com](http://berkshirehathaway.com) loads perfectly
and looks the same.

~~~
i336_
c2 recently became obsessed with "federated wikis" apparently due to some
unimpressed person threatening to batch-delete the entire site. Unfortunately
JavaScript-based solutions became interesting.

I'm mildly curious what would happen if you tried to build NetSurf on that
thing. It compiles for AmigaOS and RISC OS...

~~~
kristopolous
First let me apologize to the HPUX wizard that will very likely read this for
being such a bumbling amateur. Anyway, here I go:

H3:54/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake --version

GNU Make 3.80

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ /usr/local/bin/gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 3.3.1

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake BUILD_CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc
CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc

...

gmake[1]: Entering directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem
/makefiles/Makefile.tools:403: /Makefile.gcc: No such file or directory

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem
/makefiles/Makefile.tools:460: /Makefile.pkgconfig: No such file or directory

Makefile:40: /Makefile.top: No such file or directory

gmake[1]: __* No rule to make target ` /Makefile.top'. Stop.

gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

gmake: __* [ /raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/build-stamp]

Error 2

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$

Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X
to a modern machine as in

$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&

This gives a protocol error. So instead I'm running it all through a
vncserver, which uses a more legacy protocol. I've tried things like

$ Xnest -query hp :1

but I get the classic CDE hour glass, a black screen, and nothing more.

It's honestly nice to pull this thing out of the closet just to remember how
unfriendly things used to be. You type a command and realize "well gee, this
thing doesn't have that. Alright, here's a more painful way..." You don't even
get things like arrow keys and backspace for free. Gotta stty them.

~~~
mcguire
" _Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can 't do
remote X to a modern machine as in_

    
    
        "$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&
    

" _This gives a protocol error._ "

Ok, I'm impressed. That's the first time I've seen that.

~~~
kristopolous
I believe it's relatively recent. I've heard second-hand from better men than
me that they are dropping a lot of legacy things. As far as I can tell, the HP
is running X11R5. It doesn't do -version, the man page is for R5 and the
binary is dated "Oct 27 1997" ... so yeah, 20 years ago. It's honestly a
reasonable thing to break.

~~~
mcguire
X11R5 is older than I am (and I'm old). Wow.

That would explain it.

------
swang
this is why i'm not completely 100% with google photos. i'm ready to spend the
monthly fees to store all my pictures in its original resolution, use google
photos to manage/search my photos. except i don't want to commit to using it
and then finding out google doesn't want to support it and just dumps it.

same thing with google voice. i use it but i've never committed to using it as
my main phone number.

maybe it's a catch-22, but maybe google should stop sunsetting so many
products so as to cause people to have no faith in their products. pretty much
the only untouchable thing is gmail since the negative press for that would
probably end google to the general public.

~~~
nattaylor
I'm betting that Google Photos will necessarily stick around in order to keep
Android competitive with iOS (and perhaps Windows.) I desperately hope they
make it a paid service, if needed, rather than shutter it.

I've fully committed and have uploaded 40,932 photos. All of the automation
has been amazing.

~~~
coldpie
I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do
with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see
lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud
automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that
bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?

~~~
nattaylor
This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many
photos are pretty pointless.

In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital
camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them.

To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100
albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I
want a trip down memory lane, etc.

As for the other ~36k, I don't have any statistics but:

* On ~10 occasions I've sent emails to friends after getting one of the "this day in YYYY" notifications with a link to the photos

* On a few (~4) occasions, I've used the faces grouping to find old, fun photos of friends

* Yesterday I happened to get a "This day in YYYY" notification that reminded me about an event I photographed at my neighbors house, but had forgotten to send the photos (7 years ago, oops)

* I'd rediscovered some DSLR photos I probably would have missed thanks to the "approx location tagging" (that taps in my phones location history)

* I share photos far more frequently since its free, unlimited and auto-upload

* The auto-animations and auto-panoramas have made me go back and rediscover photos from some old trips

* Just the other day my Mom was interested in a photo she remembered me taking on a trip in 2013. I was able to search the place name and find the photo in seconds

I started down the path of Google Photos because my old workflow of manually
merging smartphone and DSLR pics on disk and then not having a good
centralized album management system felt clunky.

I'm surprised by how often I find myself going to
[http://photos.google.com](http://photos.google.com) now.

~~~
xanderstrike
The value of Google's automated processing of images can't be understated.
Last year I uploaded roughly 50,000 photos to Google, which was every photo I
had taken since 2006. Google automatically created albums for every vacation
I'd gone on in that time, plus many of the major events. Weddings, concerts,
etc, were all identified.

Also the face search is probably the most brilliant piece of it. I began
meticulously tagging photos in Lightroom a few years ago, and had probably
15-20% of my photos tagged with location and people in the photo. It was a
pain in the ass and took forever to get to that point.

Meanwhile it took less than a week to upload everything to Google Photos, and
now I can search through over 10 years of photos by person. You can also
search by event, object, location, etc ("coachella," "sailboat," or "haiti" as
examples).

~~~
nattaylor
I completely agree. In other software labeling (albums, location, faces, tags,
etc) is tedious, time consuming and fragile. In Google Photos I barely even
think about it.

------
Animats
It's not ad-supported, so Google has to actually sell the service and collect
money from large numbers of small users. Google is not good at that.

~~~
avar
They manage that with Google Music, recurring Play store payments etc.

~~~
Groxx
With a couple orders of magnitude more users, yes. Willing to pay $100/year to
remove branding on a search engine you add to your website is far, far less
common than "willing to pay to listen to music".

~~~
vacri
Plenty of small businesses spring for gmail and Google Apps for Business

~~~
Groxx
Which are also a couple orders of magnitude fewer in number than music-
listeners.

Nonzero to be sure, but _nothing_ like the numbers they're used to in free,
ad-supported products.

------
mitola
This actually is making me fairly frustrating. Me and my team were literally
just finishing the GSS integration and all of the sudden the only option
google is suggesting is "will automatically convert to Custom Search Engine
(CSE). Custom Search Engine is an ads-supported product "

~~~
saycheese
Per the Google's statement: "On April 1, 2017, Google will discontinue sales
of the Google Site Search. All new purchases and renewals must take place
before this date. The product will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018."

If I were you and you really had already finished the Google Search dev work
you referenced, I would pay for service as soon as possible for the duration
up until April 1, 2018. Use the service, see how user users are really using
it, then use what you've learned to plan for the future.

~~~
mitola
Thank a lot for your suggestion :) We will do that as soon as possible.

------
aembleton
This could be a good opportunity for DuckDuckGo to make some money and improve
awareness of their brand.

~~~
Malic
No kidding! I would totally give such a service a serious look for future
client work.

~~~
0mp
It's happening right now:
[https://duckduckgo.com/search_box](https://duckduckgo.com/search_box)

~~~
Malic
That's not quite what I'm looking for - I need an API. I need to maintain
client branding on site without mentioning the search service provider - and I
would expect to be billed for that.

The conversion here at HN on this topic has been useful in pointing out such
services that I didn't know about, for which I am thankful!

------
rndstr
Differences between GSS and CSE:
[https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4541888?hl=en](https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4541888?hl=en)

As someone who just finished moving a custom search result site implementation
from GSA (discontinued) to GSS this is highly outrageous. No access to the
XML/JSON API is a showstopper.

------
pritambarhate
Last couple of years or so have been an eye opener for me on how I choose
libraries, tools and services for my project. One important lesson was that
never choose a service which don't have plug and play open source alternative.
Even hyped start ups go out of business and big companies like Facebook and
Google shut down services.

Third party APIs are a even bigger risk. Facebook and Twitter APIs used to
change quite often 2-3 years ago. (Haven't personally worked on this off late
though.) APIs and services which seem too cheap are generally the ones which
should be avoided. Because it is more likely that the companies running these
will not find a sustainable business model.

Even Open Source projects get abandoned quite often. Sometimes a team puts
together an impressive open source project and then they get acquired by a big
company which results in abandonment of the project. I have one client who has
his startup riding on Kurento Media Server for WebRTC calls. This product is
in development from last one and half years. Now, after Kurento's acquisition
by Twilio, Kurento's future is not clear. Also it's not a project which any
body can just get into and start developing it further. Thankfully Kurento is
not abandoned yet by the development team, but I had read somewhere that they
are looking for new maintainers.

The lesson learned is only depend on mature open source projects and depend on
PaaS services which make those open source projects available as easy to use
services. Even if that PaaS service go down, there is a high chance that you
will find someone who can deploy and support it for you.

However, if you are depending on a third party API or a relatively unknown
Open Source Project for critical functionality, treat it as a big risk in your
product's future road map and be prepared with a contingency plan.

Right now in cloud services there are way too many products which are not
easily replaceable. But these are easy to use and sometimes solve really
difficult problems. So the temptation to use them is too high. So they still
end up in the stack, especially when the clients themselves push for these
services to be used.

------
Mayzie
Of course, another product shut down by Google.

~~~
allenz
Custom search has large maintenance costs--a lot of effort which really isn't
interesting for any developer to work on. And apparently companies aren't
willing to pay enough to overcome that. I don't think Google has any
obligation not to shut down products.

~~~
gldalmaso
They have no obligation, but it hurts adoption of their other products since
it has happened often.

They should be mindful of that trend since they already have gotten a bad rep
because of it. At some point in the future, when they really need it, few
people will jump on their new band wagon.

------
jpdus
On the German page I get when following this link, there is still no shutdown
notice visible but only the "normal" marketing page for Site Search
(+pricing). Does the shutdown only affect US customers or does Google fail to
communicate this internationally?

~~~
adamcharnock
Hum, I'm seeing the notice in the UK.

------
Sytten
I suggest using Coveo, it's the recommended thing to replace google enterprise
search. Much more intelligent and better integration with the data.

It's already used by majors companies like GoPro, Adobe and L'Oréal.

Yes I worked there once :)

~~~
alasano
Another vote for Coveo (as someone who still works there)! The overall
integration, security features, analytics, connectors and machine learning
functionalities are beyond anything that Google or pretty much anyone else has
to offer.

FYI We're also hiring and growing very rapidly! careers.coveo.com

------
merricksb
Detailed article with comments from a Google spokesperson:

[http://fortune.com/2017/02/21/google-site-search-
discontinue...](http://fortune.com/2017/02/21/google-site-search-
discontinued/)

------
nodesocket
What are some competitors to site search?

~~~
balsamiq
We've been using [https://swiftype.com/site-search](https://swiftype.com/site-
search) for a couple of years. It's great.

~~~
nodesocket
Pricing starts at $299/mo. Bit steep if you're a smaller company.

~~~
elena_brz
They dropped the free plan some time ago, although if using their WP plugin on
a wordpress site, you can still make use of it. I also found SearchIQ but
never used it to be honest, so I can't really tell. Algolia is quite powerful
too.

------
dest
So, more room for Algolia et al?

------
hypertexthero
Here's a quick and easy search form for your site:

    
    
        <form id="searchform" name="searchform" action="https://google.com/search">
          <input class="searchtext" name="q" type="text" value="" placeholder="" maxlength="300" />
          <input name="q" type="hidden" value="site:www.yoursite.tld" />
          <input class="searchbutton" name="submit" type="submit" value="Search" />
        </form>

------
timvdalen
Where is the shut-down message? I just get the pricing page for GSS in Dutch.

EDIT: I was also able to create a new site search engine.

~~~
galeksic
_> Where is the shut-down message?_

Try English version of that page:
[https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html?hl=en](https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html?hl=en)

 _> EDIT: I was also able to create a new site search engine._

The shut-down message says " _On April 1, 2017, Google will discontinue sales
of the Google Site Search_ ".

~~~
tokenizerrr
Amusing how they don't feel the need to inform non-english people.

~~~
i336_
That message is possibly in a to-be-translated queue.

For something like this.... maybe not _all_ languages, but just the ones that
analytics detect significant traffic from.

~~~
tokenizerrr
I checked Dutch, German and French. Nothing.

------
joeld42
I've always wondered why Google doesn't just slowly raise the prices on things
like this until either everyone switches due to attrition and they can shut it
down noiselessly, or it becomes profitable.

There's been a few services (Google Reader and CodeSearch) that I would have
paid a couple bucks a month for.

------
DanBlake
Shit, I use this for image search. Basically we let users submit the title of
items they own (for everydaycarry.com), we do a google image search for that
title and display back the top 5 results from googles image search to the
user, letting them click on the appropriate product. We then link that product
to the google image source URL.

Anyone know of a alternative product that would let this keep happening? When
we implemented this originally, I did not find any competing options from
either Microsoft, Amazon or Yahoo- That was 2 years ago though, so things may
have changed for image search API's.

~~~
skzo
I think you'll still be able to do:

[https://www.google.pt/search?q=knives+site:http://everydayca...](https://www.google.pt/search?q=knives+site:http://everydaycarry.com&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=745&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVqenp06PSAhVLmBoKHapNCLEQ_AUIBigB)

~~~
DanBlake
We are looking for links to products on other sites- for instance
[https://www.google.com/search?q=gerber+shard&source=lnms&tbm...](https://www.google.com/search?q=gerber+shard&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

Also, the link you give above is just googles normal link. You cant
programmatically call it, or google will start throwing up a captcha which
will stop automated queries.

------
arca_vorago
I have a feeling this is geared towards pushing fortune/alexa 1000 into
buying/using the google enterprise search appliance, which they charge a
pretty penny for but don't allow you to see inside of (black box on the
network). I was looking at one and got quoted 50k, and then when I balked and
stopped communications with the sales guys they started offering price
reductions... like 30k for a blackbox search appliance on my network is really
something _enticing_!

~~~
mish15
Unlikely, the GSA product is also discontinued. This is a push to a google
cloud alternative i would guess.

------
edpichler
That's why I think twice before embracing some Google Product.

------
dpatru
What is so hard technically about site search that there doesn't exist open-
source solutions for people to run on their own sites or rent for a small fee?

------
jpadkins
[https://customsearch.googleblog.com/](https://customsearch.googleblog.com/)

Also posted changes coming to the CSE API.

------
Zarkonnen
[https://xkcd.com/1361/](https://xkcd.com/1361/)

~~~
kasparsklavins
Pay per DNS lookup? There's a SaaS somewhere in there.

~~~
grega_g
More like IaaS

------
impressthenet
Any site can free themselves from the Borg:
[https://duckduckgo.com/search_box](https://duckduckgo.com/search_box)

------
jpkeisala
They shut down Google Mini few years ago. I never really understood why would
they do that. Looks like they are on the route to shut down all enterprise
services.

------
johnchristopher
How does it relate to google search console ? I don't understand the
relationship or the difference between both (unless there are the same ?).

~~~
elena_brz
Google Search Console is Google Webmasters Tool, it's a different thing.

------
donum
That's a pitty for people like me who are using it.

Although you have to say the product had its flaws on larger scales.

------
simonistvan
If you are running an eCommerce site and you are looking to improve your
search www.prefixbox.com can be an alternative. We are developing it for 2.5
years now and it is a data driven solution.

BR, Istvan Simon

------
vorticalbox
Aprils fool 2 years in advance.

------
ashishkoujalgi
April fool?

------
orik
wow - shocking;

I wonder if anyone will move into this space instead. hoping for duck duck go
or a new startup.

------
tbrowbdidnso
What? Why? You can still do the same search by typing site:URL in Google so
it's literally zero investment by them to keep it workinf. And these people
were paying for it.

I can't help think this has something to do with their AMP articles. They
don't want you to leave google, ever

~~~
century19
I believe that this Enterprise Search can be used for pages that are not
freely available on the Internet. I've seen it used on portals where you have
to be logged in to access the content.

~~~
seanp2k2
Not sure how much it overlaps with
[https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html](https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html)
or what the future for GSA is, given Google's track record for discontinuing
products.

~~~
texec
GSA is already discontinued: [http://fortune.com/2016/02/04/google-ends-
search-appliance/](http://fortune.com/2016/02/04/google-ends-search-
appliance/)

------
ekiara
I read this and assumed it was just an early April Fools Gag.

Actually, I'm still not convinced that it isn't linked to April Fools.

~~~
kantharia
I also think this is some kind-of April Fool Joke

------
_Codemonkeyism
For a brief moment I've read "Google shutting 'Down Side Search'".

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
LOL -4 karma on that one.

