
Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search - thisisblurry
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/fall-sweep.html
======
saurik
So, in 2005 I was involved in a company that thought "man, it would be great
to build a search engine for source code". I even started putting together
components for it, such as a model for finding text inside of larger documents
that had statistical properties similar to code, auto-detecting the language,
so you could find code snippets inside of blog posts.

However, by the time we got organized enough to actually do it, Google Code
launched, and had this really awesome code searching feature, that everyone
considered to be "more than good enough" and "comprehensive, as Google is
indexing the hell out of stuff like this".

But, now, Google has now determined that that wasn't sustainable, and has shut
down the project. Which means that both our company, and any other company,
that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at
this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all
suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code.

This... (I now emphatically point at the previous paragraphs) is why I don't
like Google very much: they have such large resources available to them that
they tend to just swoop in and offer an unsustainable service at a loss,
training users that "things should be so free it hurts: in fact, they must be
losing money on every use of this" (Google Voice being a great example),
thereby stifling innovation by people who can't possibly undercut that.

Note: this isn't even a problem specific to Google... startup companies that
get VC money tend to also cause this problem. They get tons of money, offer a
service at a heavy loss while they use that burn time to determine a business
model, actively knowing that they are operating at a loss in order to get
users as fast as possible from other people who might try to get them.

Of course, the result is that the company usually either totally implodes
(typical of any startup) or, even more insidiously (for the projects that
actually becoming successful, even quite popular / common), come up with a
business model so ludicrous that the users actively revolt against the entire
concept of the service...

... and, where do they go? To some other free service offered by another
company that managed to get equally large sums of VC money because they point
at that other company that had hundreds of millions of users that just failed
because of a bad business model, something they will know how to fix (in a
couple years or so, once they get around to figuring that part out...).

:( I liked Google Code search, and I'm going to miss it.

~~~
joebadmo
_Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had
a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would
probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust
back into 2005, unable to search for code._

I see two viable reactions to this:

1\. There's now a vacuum where Code Search was, and, evidently, some demand.
Why not startup now?

2\. Not even Google could find a viable model for Code Search, even with their
resources and scale, and (ugh) synergy. Google did the research for me. (And
if you think Google dropped it because they couldn't find a viable _free_
model, and you think there's a viable _paid_ model, see #1.)

As for startups, the phenomenon you describe seems to apply mostly to things
that depend on network effect and probably advertising. If you have an idea
that brings value to someone and can demonstrate a sustainable business model
based on charging for that value, I would imagine that to be a much more
attractive option for people who want something they can depend on than a VC
funded free product startup.

~~~
saurik
1) I am not whining as an entrepreneur that I did not start the company in
2005: I did other things that I am quite proud of, and which frankly have
probably been more interesting and successful than having worked on that code
searching mechanism.

Instead, I am whining as a user of Google Code search that we have just lost
six years of progress on searching source code. Having a company that starts
today in this space, while they will have an easier time (due to advances)
starting and getting up quickly, is drastically different than a company that
started six years ago, and might have a large index, advanced algorithms, etc.
at this point.

2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of
these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here
by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have
reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain
things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward.

(edit: I forgot to add this point) I mean, seriously: Google, a company that
makes all of its money on advertisements, and for whom ads permeate
everything, doesn't have ads on Google Code Search, and AFAIR never did. If
you do absolutely nothing else for such a service, as Google, you'd put some
ads on it; even Gmail has ads, and that's a place where people find them
creepy.

I therefore simply cannot believe that they actually are looking at this
project as something that is worth their time to make sustainable: they are a
giant company with a thousand things to do; this was cool one day, maybe
useful to some engineers internally, and they kind of just did it, and dumped
the result on the ecosystem, where it created a little vortex-of-free-and-good
that eventually has collapsed into a singularity, and will be gone in the next
couple months, leaving us with the "vacuum" that you mention.

Meanwhile, it might simply be because even if it was successful, the userbase
would be tiny, and the revenue generated would be "not enough to justify the
lack of focus" (Google is getting behind the whole "more wood, fewer arrows"
thing lately); whereas, to a small company, it might have enough margins to
sustain a few people, which is "enough to bother with" at that level.

~3) The point here isn't that people who care about sustainability should be
using Pinboard.in instead of del.icio.us (although they should, and those that
didn't got burned at the last minute): it is that society is worse off because
there are people in the ecosystem who are operating unsustainably.

~~~
joebadmo
I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also
think it's more complicated than that.

For example, it's hard to say whether the six years of code search we got from
google was better or worse than what a sustainable startup could have
provided. And if was better, how do you measure that against its sudden
disappearance until there's some viable replacement (if there will ever be
one). It's also hard to say whether it was ever possible to run it
sustainably.

I think for every code search, there's an equally unsustainable (at first)
Google product that provides a lot of value for free to users.

Yes, sometimes it means that they kill opportunities for others who could
possible make sustainable businesses, but it also means that they can run
something unsustainably for some period of time to see whether it's worth it
to even make sustainable.

It's hard to say whether overall for society there have been more cons than
pros. Anecdotally, my experience is that Google has provided me a lot of value
for free.

~~~
saurik
I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added
it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe
you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will
restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case.

Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't
even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them
the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it
might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough
to have something great occur).

I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being
used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from
somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a
cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda.

Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific
feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation
where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually
cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that
problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some
twisted way about that. ;P

I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad
for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly
cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build
empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google
and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the
atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty
abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the
abstract-ness was fun.)

~~~
prbuckley
I enjoyed reading your back and forth in this thread. I can see both of your
points and don't really know what side of the fence I land on my self but I
would like to jump in with one observation you might find poignant.

To carry on with your climate analogy... My economics professor used to talk
about "the destructive winds of innovation or invention". I think this might
be a perfect example of this. Markets are a messy place where new ideas
displace old ones, new models challenge old models and sometime you compete
with companies that behave in unsustainable and irrational ways. I think you
can wish it wasn't that way but I tend to believe this is a symptom of the
human condition. What alternative is there? Surly none of us want the
government to regulate what projects companies choose to work on? We are stuck
with people self regulating themselves and this always has mixed results.

~~~
saurik
Just because it is not rational to assume that people will not act
unsustainable, does not mean you have to like the people or companies that do.
Just because I know that there will always be someone polluting the ecosystem
to make a profit, doesn't mean I should shrug my shoulders and not write
articles about why that's a bad thing for other people.

------
CJefferson
I'm very disappointed to see google code search go.

It was very useful (for me at least, don't read this as a comment on the whole
committee / process) in finishing the new C++ standard, and answering the
question "Well, did anyone ever really write code like X?" (the answer was
usually yes).

Buzz makes a lot of sense, although I imagine some users will be disappointed
it couldn't be more 'cleanly' imported into google+.

~~~
icefox
Same here on google code. I have used it on multiple occasions to find out how
users are using a class or API to get a feel for what API was actually used
for. Not to mention when learning a new API having the ability to see real
world usage was always helpful. Not to mention the ease of finding apps that
had security issues in codebases after it was found. Anyone know of a
replacement for this?

~~~
mapleoin
Well github's code search is a pretty good replacement, although it's limited
to github.

~~~
geraldalewis
GitHub's code search lacks regular expressions, which makes it far less useful
than Google Code Search.

------
ajays
I may be biased, but: I feel like Google's "geek cred" is slipping. It feels
like PMs (and their "monetization strategies") are gaining control over at El
Goog, shutting down anything that isn't "revenue positive".

You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of
services like Code Search.

So the slow slide of Google turning into "just another tech company" starts...

~~~
sixtofour
"You _can't measure_ geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of
services like Code Search."

And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no
longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable
benefits.

~~~
nir
The funny thing is that the supposedly mature "we're a public, billion dollar
grown up corporation now" approach almost always ends up robbing the company
of its ability to lead and innovate.

Google is neglecting products it's great at (eg GAE) to focus on areas it's
completely clueless about (like Google+). There's no real risk here, the ads
are going to continue pumping cash in, but it's slowly becoming a big dumb
company.

My bet is that within 2 years they will buy someone like Twitter or FourSquare
for n*$100m, and you'll know the new AOL has arrived.

~~~
sixtofour
I probably agree with your first paragraph. That might be the inevitable
consequence of big, or it might be too tight a focus on explicit shareholder
value in the regulations, or ...

Your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs won't surprise me.

------
ch
Sad to see Code Search go. I just tried a simple search for 'pthread_t' on
both Koders (<http://www.koders.com>) and Krugle
(<http://opensearch.krugle.org>). Both are mentioned elsewhere in the comments
as possible alternatives.

Krugle found no results. Koders found results, but the response time was very
large.

Both have a long way to go in being a viable Code Search replacement.

Hopefully Code Search just gets rolled into the primary Google search product.

NOTE:

I was just looking over the Koders results. It is tokenizing 'pthread_t' as
'pthread' 't', so the top results are not what I would consider useful. I'm
sure I can change some settings to get proper tokenization for my languages
identifiers, but that is more work up front.

~~~
Uhhrrr
Double quotes seem to stop it from tokenizing, e.g. "pthread_t".

~~~
ch
Yes, but in a code search engine it would make sense to not break words that
are valid symbols in more programming languages than not. It's all about
sensible defaults.

~~~
gtani
There's a lot of significance in function/method signatures and non-alphanum
chars that google is getting to grips with (and hoogle/hayoo for haskell seems
to be state of the art).

Ruby Class#method, the (dozens or more) symbolic "operators" in scala,
haskell, ocaml (which are generally functions, not operators).

I think it's up to each language community to build those tools now.

------
spiffistan
There's a competitor to google code search at least: <http://www.koders.com/>

Actually, I'm kinda glad they're phasing stuff out. It shows courage to do
that, a lesson probably hard learned at google. They have a myriad of
products, but would probably do much better with them if they thoroughly
finished them before release.

~~~
joebadmo
Yes, one of the things Larry Page talked about in the earnings call yesterday
was aggressive project pruning and focus. I agree that this is a good sign of
Page's leadership.

~~~
frossie
The danger lies in being a company with a reputation of launching stuff and
then not sticking with them. At some point that starts harming adoption levels
of new products.

Edit to comment below:

"Trying and failing is a far better outcome than never having tried at all" is
a great mantra for individuals or even small startups, but I am not sure how
it applies here. I am still bitter over Google abandoning Notebook (which I
was quite a heavy user of) and canning Calendar Public Search (search!!). I
then reluctantly allowed my team to use Wave, only to have that one canned
after building a process around it. No, it is not better for me that they
tried and _changed their minds_ (they did NOT "fail" technically), because I
could have picked another product at the time that did intend to stick around.

People look at Google, with all the money and people that it has, and ask "How
much could it POSSIBLY cost to keep Code Search going? How is it possible that
Google can't afford it?". The only answer I can come up with is (1) It can
afford it (2) But it doesn't care to.

So sure, if you are happy to see Google launch stuff that it has no commitment
to, great for you. I'm having better luck taking chances with startups and
their products. At least they have skin in the game.

Edit #2: @joebadmo - but that is exactly what I think when I see a new Google
product - "will it reach such large levels of adoption so that Google will
keep it". And I keep getting it wrong - even for products like Wave and Code
Search which I thought _surely_ they are used internally and so will be kept
around if only because of that - nope, either they are not used internally (if
not, why not?) or even that is not protection enough.

Sure, startups and small-person concerns are also risky propositions, but
let's not forget the numbers. 100,000 users are a "failure" for google, but
they are a wild success for a small startup, at least the ones not looking for
a big exit. If you inlcude app writers as "startups", their longevity is
phenomenal - I have never had an app stop working on me because somebody
turned a sever off somewhere. Perhaps I have been freakishly lucky. The only
other product I have had to stop using because it was pulled was wesabe.com.

~~~
joebadmo
I would definitely not base any sort of important business function on any
free Google beta product without seriously considering the difficulty of
migrating upon shutdown of said service.

I assume that a major criterion for Google shutting down a service is low
usage. For them, that constitutes failure. Very few people were using
Notebook, Calendar Search, Wave, or Code Search. I'm sure it's fairly simple
to calculate the cost benefit of devoting even minimal resources to a product
that 1. doesn't make money; and 2. doesn't substantially make the web better
for some minimum threshold of people.

Google is one of the richest companies in the world and could afford a lot of
things, but that's not justification that it should.

You're right that there's an interesting tension between starting/failing fast
and getting people to trust that a product will stick around. But I don't
actually think that's a big part of the calculation for most people. When
Google releases a new product, I usually go either "Ooh, that sounds awesome,
I'm signing up for the beta immediately," or "Not interested, moving on." I
rarely go "I'm not going to use this because it probably won't get enough
users to last."

I'm glad to hear that going with startup technologies is going well for you,
but the danger seems just as big. Startups fail all the time, and you have no
recourse afterward.

~~~
morsch
> I assume that a major criterion for Google shutting down a service is low
> usage. For them, that constitutes failure.

I guess the question is, low usage compared to what? Compared to other Google
services (search, mail), almost anything will be very low usage.

------
blauwbilgorgel
Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go.
Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study.

The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example:
just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the
"estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]).

I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in
different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope
that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then
those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse,
but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace).

[1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like:

    
    
      "X is a *" and "X, such as *,"
    

[2] Estimated results for "test". With API: 257.000.000 vs. manual search
2.750.000.000

~~~
shriphani
Would this help in any way? [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/collaboration/focus/cs/w...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/collaboration/focus/cs/web-ngram.aspx)

------
chaosmachine
Google Code Search has been pretty broken (for my use case, anyway) for a
while. I build Drupal Code Search[1] on top of their API back in 2008, and a
few months later, they stopped indexing code from Drupal.org. Since then, 2
new versions of Drupal (6 and 7) have been released, and none of the new code
has been indexed, making my site largely useless except for legacy code
searches.

I guess I will just shut it down completely come 2012, I don't have any way to
do grep-style searches at the same speed Google's API could.

[1] <http://drupalcodesearch.com/>

~~~
jjwiseman
Was it broken in some way other than it didn't index drupal.org?

~~~
bartl
Drupal.org most likely was not the only site they no longer indexed. Probably
no code site was still being indexed, at all.

------
kingkilr
No! I loved code search, I'd use it as evidence when proposing the deprecation
of API methods in open source projects :)

------
kpozin
This is awful. Code Search is an indispensable tool for finding reference code
and real-world uses of various libraries. I don't know of anything on par with
it.

~~~
simonw
GitHub search is pretty good - it only searches code that's been hosted (or
mirrored) on GitHub, but that's a LOT of code.

~~~
nene
IMHO Github code search totally sucks. It's better than nothing, but it feels
like the bare minimum - just a normal fulltext index applied to source code.

\- It's not case-sensitive, which sucks for searching code.

\- It's unable to search for any punctuation characters (searching for "foo()"
is the same as searching for "foo"), which totally sucks for searching source
code.

\- The search finds lots and lots of duplicates. Even multiple matches in one
file are listed as completely separate results.

\- You can limit the search to one of the languages in dropdown menu, but if
your language of choice doesn't happen to be in there, you're out of luck. For
example you can't limit your search only to C header files.

Simply by adding package:github.com to Google Code Search search box one can
apply a better tool for code in github, but unfortunately the good times seem
to be over soon.

Really sad to see it go...

------
sdfjkl
I wouldn't miss Code search much if the regular Google search would understand
regular expressions or terms with underscores. But it does not, and also
increasingly annoys me by misinterpreting my search terms and searching for
the things it believes I meant instead of the things I told it to search for.

And while DuckDuckGo has a much nicer search frontend, it's Bing-fed index
sadly sucks, making it no universal replacement for Google's declining
frontend.

------
MatthewPhillips
Headline should be: Search company shuts down search product to focus on
social networking.

I suppose their Blog Search is next.

------
mahmoudimus
I'm actually really surprised that code search is getting phased off. It's a
great resource to see how libraries are implemented in the wild -- it also
exposes some common errors that lots of library authors make.

So sad to see this one go -- but I think it will make for another opportunity
to allow a competing site like koders.com to iterate on building a product
that developers would love to use...I hope.

------
bdonlan
It's too bad about code search - that was really helpful for finding example
code (and linking to specific snippets of code within open-source projects!)

------
lithiumn
Hate to see code search go. I always found it useful when having problems with
some less-well documented libraries to see how they were used in the real
world.

------
pbreit
I'm surprised about the Code Search news. That seems to be squarely within
Google's mission.

~~~
jrockway
How do you sell ads on a bunch of code results? That's the only logical
explanation I see for shutting this down.

I find a globally-searchable database of code useful enough to want to rewrite
this myself. I won't get all of the Internet, but if I can get Github and GNU
/ Apache / etc., it will be enough.

~~~
pbreit
i"ve only thought about it for about 30 seconds but it would seem to be the
absolute best place to post engineering job ads.

~~~
mongol
Also - ads for e-books perhaps. If you end up looking at Hibernate code, you
are struggling with Hibernate. Why not clicking on "Hibernate In Action"?

------
sx
At Pattern Insight (<http://patterninsight.com>) we have build a source code
search engine. We do not give this to our customers as a standalone tool most
of the time but it's the underlying technology for our product, Code
Assurance, which helps companies eliminate bugs from their releases.

We use it internally to search our code / libraries, if anyone is interested
in indexing/searching his own code, especially if it's open source, I would be
happy to provide a copy. Email: spiros at patterninsight.com

------
tambourine_man
It never worked all that well for me.

What I want is a "curl | grep" for the web. Just something that searches the
entire page, including <head> <!--> etc. I can do without fancy semantics.

But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me
deeply.

~~~
Donald
>But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me
deeply.

They're just trying to redirect you to more profitable (i.e., a greater
probability that you will impress an ad) search queries.

------
antimora
Really?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information"

How is so when code search is going away? Google did excellent job at indexing
the code, so why to throw away what's already working?

~~~
Raphael
Maybe they don't believe in the Lisp notion that code is data.

------
EGreg
I can understand about Google Buzz ... they are replacing it with Google+. But
what about Code Search? It's like they mention it once, and then don't give a
reason. I think that was useful for many people! I wonder why they are closing
it...

------
chintan
Speaking of focus, we went from

"Organizing Worlds Information"

==>

"Organizing People in to Circles"

Indeed exciting times!

------
heydenberk
Also: there will always be people decrying Google's tendency to launch and
phase out new products and there will always be people decrying its reticence
to try new things even if they fail, and they're probably doing a good job if
they're attracting roughly equal amounts of these responses.

------
siddhant
Buzz is fine. But what was wrong with Code Search?

------
dustingetz
buzz was awesome for link sharing via a bookmarklet to my professional
audience (compare to facebook bookmarklet for life stuff). plus isn't there
yet -- plus doesn't expose RSS feeds to work with my audience's existing
workflows. damn.

any word on a plus RSS api? i want my stream, and i want my +1 feed. i was
looking into the +1 stream yesterday, seems like google made it as hard as
possible to hit from javascript -- nonstandard http post, no JSONP = i don't
know if its possible to do client-side. damn x2.

~~~
nl
<https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list>

It returns JSON (and you need to OAuth it), but it gives the stream info you
are after.

<https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search> (with your
name) is useful too.

------
mcfunley
I used code search just yesterday. Super lame.

------
acpmasquerade
If Google can't backup the resources required for Code-Search, then who will ?
Just googled to see if any other code search service is available. It listed
one more result other than the Google Code Search. Will koders.com remain
alive. It will probably be a single. Lets hope, there will be someone backing
up Koders.

~~~
skb
Yes, Koders is here to stay and will be relaunched with several improvements
in near future. Meanwhile if you have suggestions/wishlist of improvements,
you are welcome to leave a comment here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132462>

------
kpanghmc
Does anyone know what they mean by this?

"we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself,
and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are."

Are they referring to Google Chat or are they referring to iGoogle widgets
that have "social features" (e.g. Twitter widgets, Facebook widgets, etc.)?

~~~
abraham
Some gadgets have social features so interact with friends who also use the
same gadget. For example there could be a gadget that lets you search for and
watch YouTube videos and friends you allow can see what videos you watched.
Those gadgets are going away. You Chat will still be there and gadgets that
interact with third-party social sites will still be there too.

------
plq
i don't understand why codesearch has to go. granted, it felt a bit neglected
lately, but it was truly useful.

i wish there was a way for google to open source their abandoned projects. i'm
sure someone would be willing to offer a similar service by basing it what the
google code search already does.

------
cygwin98
I hope Google open source the code behind Code Search. They don't have to
release all supporting libraries that are specific to Google's infrastructure
though. Such that those of us who actually use the service can figure out a
scaled-down implementation to serve ourselves.

------
heydenberk
I liked Buzz's idea of integrating a social inbox with the an email inbox, and
in particular I liked Reader integration with Buzz. If Google doesn't
integrate Reader and Gmail with Plus more effectively, I'll be spending _less_
time being social with Google than before.

------
madmath
I could see a product similar to code search being integrated into services
like github and others. Code search wasn't perfect, it basically just searched
code. What if you had a product that could, like an IDE, follow method
declarations and the like? That'd be cool.

------
alanh
Why I expected Buzz to be a failure, based on a cursory UX analysis &
comparison with existing social products: <http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-
already-dead> (Feb. 2010)

------
saibotd
<http://searchco.de/>

------
tlogan
What is the best alternative to Google Code Search?

~~~
daliusd
Recently I have found out that google search "function/class/variable/anything
else filetype:extension" works even better than google code search.

~~~
reinhardt
I don't know how well does code search work for searching punctuation but I'm
sure general web search doesn't cut it.

~~~
uriel
Code Search allows using regexps for searching, which is one of the things
that made it super awesome.

------
lost-theory
Nullege is still great search engine for python code.

<http://nullege.com/>

------
BrandonM
Louis CK (you might know him from the popular "Everything's Amazing and
Nobody's Happy" video) frequently appears on Opie & Anthony. He makes a
similar point regarding chains driving out local stores then closing up shop
in this show: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95IMKRkcBw>

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iam
Great. Now what are we supposed to use to search code? I can't think of any
alternatives.

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seltzered_
does this mean google reader sharing now goes to plus? Me and a close group of
friends use google reader a lot for sharing and commenting, personally more
than i ever use plus or facebook.

sharing on google reader also shared on google buzz as well though.

~~~
joebadmo
My friend group is the same, but this was always annoying because Buzz didn't
go back into Greader. So I had one friend who would post to Buzz instead of
Reader, but I would miss his posts unless I actually went to the Buzz
interface, where I would still have to wade through all the Reader shared
stuff.

I'm glad it's all moving to +. I can only assume that sharing from Reader will
be connected to + at some point. There's currently a workaround for this, but
it's ugly.

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johnx123-up
Anyone knows the reason?

I thought that it's their robot working hard (no human resources allotted for
it)

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rockerarj
That's what I really like about Google. A company with too many products just
hanging in there making losses is a company with a low morale. I think
accepting the loss and shutting down low performance products is very
important.

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jonutzz
That makes me sad. I use it a lot!

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JabavuAdams
Damn. I'll miss Code Search.

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antimora
Oh no, not the code search!

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suivix
Google's profit margins greatly exceeded expectations for the last quarter[1].
In response they are shutting down Code Search?

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-
reports-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-
strong-earnings-topping-expectations.html)

------
boomboom
boom

