
Google Ends Page Speed Service - robk
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprecation
======
cbr
Hoping to clear up some confusion: there are three things under the PageSpeed
name.

* PageSpeed Insights: tells you how to make your website faster and gives you a score.

* PageSpeed Modules (mod_pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed): open source web server plugins that rewrite your site to load faster.

* PageSpeed Service: Google-hosted proxy version of the PageSpeed Modules.

We're only deprecating PageSpeed Service.

(I'm the TL for the open source modules.)

~~~
jgrall
Thanks for the clarification. I use PageSpeed via a couple of App Engine apps
that have it enabled directly from App Engine's admin dashboard. I never had
to change any DNS settings to get it to work. Does this shutdown also mean
that PageSpeed will no longer be offered for App Engine apps? Do I need to
take any action to avoid a service interruption for my users?

~~~
cbr
Yes, App Engine support is also deprecated:

    
    
         If you are using PageSpeed integration on Google App
         Engine, it will continue to function until 1st
         December 2015, after which PageSpeed optimizations
         will no-longer be applied to your app. No action is
         required on the part of App Engine users; after this
         date apps will continue to operate, except without
         the benefit of the PageSpeed optimizations.
    

App Engine users only need to take action if they have something on their site
that depends on PageSpeed, which is very uncommon.

~~~
rey12rey
I didn't have to worry at all about trying to use webassets in realtime.
That's just one of the numerous optimisations I'll sorely miss

------
michaelbuckbee
Point of clarification - this isn't the Page Speed testing, but their
"optimizing proxy" that you'd route your site through (like Cloudflare).

~~~
chambo622
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't even realize they offered this -
CloudFlare really seems to dominate the narrative in this area.

~~~
derefr
They didn't offer it, really; new signups had been closed for a long time now.

------
captainhcg
This was an amazing product to me one year ago. I used it as CDN for my blog
hosted Amazon EC2; it speeded up the visits a lot across the world.

However, I stopped using it last year since China blocked all Google service
while my blog is mostly for Chinese readers. Though the proxy/cdn service is
shutting down, the Pagespeed Module of Apache/Nginx is awesome, which is what
I am using right now.

------
malchow
I was one of the first users of this product, and worked with Rahul Bainsal
and others quite a bit on it. It was a very powerful product diligently worked
upon by a talented team. One can only hope they'll get something juicy to work
on now!

Despite the deprecation, the PSS team is very much worthy of a salute.

------
arohner
I wasn't planning on announcing yet, but this seems like a good opportunity.

I'm working on a service that does real-time monitoring of your website
performance, as measured by your actual users, on their browser. If that
sounds interesting, my email is in my profile.

~~~
josephmx
This is already included in Analytics

~~~
arohner
People pay good money for Mixpanel and Kissmetrics, even though Google
Analytics exists.

I find GA's UI to be absolutely terrible. I plan on having better UI, more
detailed performance breakdown, and alerts / monitoring.

~~~
toephu2
I actually find GA's UI pretty good. Much better than Flurry analytics for
example.

------
foolinaround
Not sure if I should be using Google for anything except search ( pretty much
most of my eggs are in the google basket )

~~~
jccooper
Certainly anything that's not a core Google product you should think hard
about using. I got burned when they shut down Checkout. They gave me six
months notice on that, which was just barely enough to replace shopping cart,
order management, and payment processing. The first two I now have in house,
so no one can turn them off.

At least this one's fairly easy to fix, but I think there will be plenty of
people unpleasantly surprised on 3 Aug.

------
mhoad
I semi actively follow this space and had no idea that this service was ever
out of private beta. I'd have put my clients on it almost immediately had I of
known. What a shame.

~~~
mrj
It wasn't worth the additional latency in most cases, so few people used it.

------
talles
Not directly related to the end of the service but

> The Google Developers website now saves the pages you visit when you are
> logged into Google. You can quickly access them via the history icon at the
> top of the site.

What? That's my web browser responsibility...

------
josephmx
It seems to be implied that this is the same team as Mod_Pagespeed? Hopefully
that won't get discontinued as well, it's pretty valuable

~~~
cbr
We're not planning to deprecate mod_pagespeed; it's still under active
development.

------
mdekkers
This is why we don't rely on Google for anything in production, or anything
that is actually important to us.

------
ocfx
It wasn't a very good measure of page speed anyways. For example the Microsoft
dev site scores 83/100 and loads faster than any site I've ever seen before.

~~~
cbr
It sounds like you're talking about PageSpeed Insights? [1] That's not
deprecated. This announcement is about PageSpeed Service, the Google-hosted
optimizing proxy.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

------
ramon
If Google shuts down Insights I will do just like Achmed ("I'll kill you!") :)

------
daok
One more product that Google retires. I like Gmail, Google, etc but the way
Google deprecate their product start to concern me.

~~~
Kiro
Honest question: besides Google Reader, what has Google terminated that people
actually used?

~~~
pixelbath
From personal experience:

Search API: used to be able to submit keywords and get XML results back, now
it's AJAX-only and spits out formatted HTML, only 10 results, and different
from real search results. Mostly useful for people involved in SEO. No big
loss without it, but just means you have to scrape SERPs instead of getting
them nicely bundled up.

Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything
([http://www.voidtools.com/](http://www.voidtools.com/)) which is far faster
and more responsive.

Bookmarks: Edit: It is still there.

Health: I didn't use this directly, but many of us in the healthcare industry
were looking to see how Google could shake things up. Apparently, PHI is hard
and Google discontinued their service.

Voice: It hasn't been discontinued yet, but I feel certain this will be the
next big product to go. The service (and app) hasn't been updated in years,
there is no clear monetization strategy aside from international VOIP calling
(which other applications do better), and the messaging portion is mostly
covered by cellular carriers as "visual voicemail" with the widespread use of
smartphones.

~~~
DannyBee
"Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything
([http://www.voidtools.com/](http://www.voidtools.com/)) which is far faster
and more responsive. "

At the time it was discontinued. Microsoft had made it next to impossible to
build your own desktop search. In particular, it was nearly impossible to turn
off the indexing service they built (and required user intervention), making
GDS slow, and they also started blocking/changing the API's GDS was using to
make it fast. So basically, Google killed it because they didn't think they
could keep making it good.

(Nowadays, i'm pretty sure you could do it again, but ...

Also, humorously, your link gets connection refused for me :P)

"Health: I didn't use this directly, but many of us in the healthcare industry
were looking to see how Google could shake things up. Apparently, PHI is hard
and Google discontinued their service."

Everyone who didn't get out of this (IE MS) has only avoided doing so to avoid
looking bad (When i was hiring in DC, i used to get tons of resumes from
people at these services, all saying "they won't kill it completely, but they
are not investing it in anymore so i want out"). From what i know, the
industry is just too much of a mess and regulatory environment too weird for
most companies to be significantly successful here right now.

"Voice: It hasn't been discontinued yet, but I feel certain this will be the
next big product to go. The service (and app) hasn't been updated in years,
there is no clear monetization strategy aside from international VOIP calling
(which other applications do better), and the messaging portion is mostly
covered by cellular carriers as "visual voicemail" with the widespread use of
smartphones."

Go in what sense? As a separate product? I could see that. The functionality?
ISTM the likely result here is that it just becomes part of hangouts or
whatever.

~~~
pixelbath
Not sure what the problem is with the link; it seems to work fine for me from
a few different ISPs.

I meant "go" as in "get axed as a product." I agree that it's likely to roll
into Hangouts, since their offerings are trending toward the Google+ apps.

