Google Timer is gone(google.com)
google.com
Google Timer is gone
https://www.google.com/search?q=6+minute+timer
333 comments
From that thread, a viable replacement that managed to survive the Google onslaught:
https://www.online-stopwatch.com/timer/1hour/
Also from that thread, a Google engineer saying (out of context:) "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
How long before Google realizes that these casual shut-downs of side projects are harming their image tremendously?
https://www.online-stopwatch.com/timer/1hour/
Also from that thread, a Google engineer saying (out of context:) "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
How long before Google realizes that these casual shut-downs of side projects are harming their image tremendously?
It's not even side projects!
The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).
I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.
The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).
I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.
It doesn't look like it went private, just moved: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts
Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?
Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?
Odd not to use the github feature to move a repo, such that github will redirect from old urls (for web UI as well as git https).
It redirects just fine for me (?), if this is what you'r referring to:
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts
Aha, I see, the original URL in the HN comment was the org URL, which didn't redirect. https://github.com/googlei18n
I don't know why original poster was linking to that!
I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.
I don't know why original poster was linking to that!
I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.
Indeed. I actually linked the redirect to demonstrate it does indeed redirect correctly.
Talking to Googlers nowadays, I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time. Googlers are just people and now that their hiring standards have shifted we can expect to see even Google making junior-level mistakes.
More likely that Google engineers are in a bubble because of all the available internal tools. Also the interview process nowadays select people that have time to train for the interviews rather than good engineers. The Google interview is still hard, but not for the same reasons than in early 2010.
This. Their interview process selects people who have hundreds of hours to blow to practice on stupid competitive coding, aka LeetCode. These aren't people who are innovative, they're ones that know how to grind.
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Googles strategy is to find innovative people who can code well, but it's way easier and faster to determine the latter. So they hire a TON of people with these interviews and then wait for the sharp and innovative ones to float up while the not so innovative ones stay at L4.
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
Unfortunately they also have the problem that the very innovative higher level Googlers leave from boredom and/or glass ceilings at the company.
That’s not it. Googlers were good when Google was a startup with a high bar of entry trying to change things. Nowadays Google is a prestigious company. They are attractive to people who are first and foremost looking for a prestige job and don’t get me wrong they can be quite good but generally that’s not very interesting people.
"You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." —jwz
> I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time.
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
I think the problem is Google is significantly less productive with their thousands of incompetents than they used to be their their dozens of professionals.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
Does the average Googler have much input on product lifecylce decisions?
Google's organization is often described as "thousands of startups under the same roof". So each team has ownership over their product(s) and each team has the room for advocacy for their product. But if their product is deemed unprofitable or whatever by higher-ups, I assume they start experiencing pressure about that. Ultimately though I'm sure budget concerns is king, and if a SVP needs to hit some quota for revenue or whatever and your product is relatively niche then they may be able to make the argument that your time is better spent working on something more "productive".
CJK. Like a sibling comment said, a redirect would have worked but it looks like there are other issues.
Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji
If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.
Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji
If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.
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Well, at least that repo should be stable for a while
> This repository is in the process of being migrated.
...oh
> This repository is in the process of being migrated.
...oh
It sucks that Google did that, but if you're relying on a third party lib for something important/in production, why wouldn't you have your own mirror?
In Yocto development I typically rely on external OSS repos to achieve the first builds but, yes, in production one can lock down the source in a local mirror.
Did Google Fonts get killed off yet?
If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.
If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.
Fonts and tag manger is their shiv for when third party cookies and analytics are regulated.
Google fonts were already ruled a GDPR violation by a court (at least when loaded remotely), at this point it's probably a good idea to avoid those too. And probably anything else from Google with a reasonable alternative.
I’m fairly certain their engineers are aware. How long until the people at the top get it through their thick skull?
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
What could they do? It's kind of like a failed state. How to you recreate a core with integrity?
You cannot rely on the managers that you want to let go to implement the change that you need.
You cannot rely on the managers that you want to let go to implement the change that you need.
This is a very astute observation, and one that I've seen in practice all too often. Thank you for this remarkable insight, I will definitely put it to use.
> You cannot rely on the managers that you want to let go to implement the change that you need.
I also cannot generate the change I need by myself. It’s a losing proposition to expect too much.
I also cannot generate the change I need by myself. It’s a losing proposition to expect too much.
>They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
> It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
> I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance.
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
I think the people making this sort of decision ("Should we kill X minor feature of Y product?") are quite a long way down from the top, and probably were engineers themselves in the past. This isn't a "pointy haired boss" level decision. It's a trivial feature in a core product. It's much more likely it just needs someone to own it and no one wants to.
How long until people get it through their think skull? You are not the customer. Google's customers are corporations advertising and spying on you for the US government.
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
There's no incentive for people to do that: things like maps, search, and gmail are fantastic products, and on the other side of the equation it doesn't negatively impact my life in the slightest to have google profiting from having access to private information about my life. That's the case for the vast majority of people; their private lives aren't interesting enough for there to be any reason to avoid selling them to tech companies in exchange for excellent products. So it's quite deliberate; it's not a stupid mistake that people are making due to lack of thought processes in their thick skulls. On the contrary, it's the population of people voicing your opinion that is making the mistake in their risk analysis: you are both wildly overestimating the probability that something genuinely bad will happen and also overestimating the extent to which your private life is interesting to anyone else.
That's pretty much how I've always seen it.
Though I suspect a very large % of Google product users don't even give it a second thought that if they're getting something for "free" they must be paying in some sort of hidden/indirect manner.
I'm actually a fan of targeting advertising too - when it's done well it can genuinely be a useful sort of information that can assist in deciding what products to buy. What I don't get is why it's so often not very smart (e.g. getting tonnes of ads for a product that I literally just bought and couldn't even have received yet given shipping times).
> it doesn't negatively impact my life
It will. You will see some day.
It will. You will see some day.
What's an example of a way in which you hypothesize it will negatively impact my life?
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When they have lost revenue enough quarters in a row that they have to shuffle and start doing business differently.
Until something big changes they reap record profits off our data and people continue to be the product while their customers continue to be the advertisers.
Until something big changes they reap record profits off our data and people continue to be the product while their customers continue to be the advertisers.
Even if that happens, it's not going to change the core problem.
They'll just what microsoft did, and say "look, we are good people now". The world will forgive and forget, and use their product hapilly. But because the underlying cause hasn't change, only the context, as soon as the context will change again, we will be back to square one.
They'll just what microsoft did, and say "look, we are good people now". The world will forgive and forget, and use their product hapilly. But because the underlying cause hasn't change, only the context, as soon as the context will change again, we will be back to square one.
They'll likely blame it on something else.
This. It comes from the top. Without a come-to-Jesus moment, there’s no reason for management to learn discipline.
>a viable replacement that managed to survive the Google onslaught
One I like better, no ads, no stopwatch function though: https://e.ggtimer.com/
One I like better, no ads, no stopwatch function though: https://e.ggtimer.com/
Funny domain!
A throwback from the days when domain hacks like del.icio.us were all the rage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack
My brain refuses to read them mentally as a contiguous word, and I hate that. There are always induced pauses.
I agree that it hurts them tremendously.
One one hand, sucking the life out of the web ecosystem and then killing their vampire implementation is really bad.
On the other hand, the alternative to shipping a DOOMED implementation is Google not shipping these in the first place, which people also don't want.
The least the company could do to not destroy the ecosystem would be to open source or at least write up these implementations for someone to rebuild black-box.
Realistically, any developer could write a blog with black-box reimplementations.
An alternative is to keep a team explicitly for life support of these projects.
One one hand, sucking the life out of the web ecosystem and then killing their vampire implementation is really bad.
On the other hand, the alternative to shipping a DOOMED implementation is Google not shipping these in the first place, which people also don't want.
The least the company could do to not destroy the ecosystem would be to open source or at least write up these implementations for someone to rebuild black-box.
Realistically, any developer could write a blog with black-box reimplementations.
An alternative is to keep a team explicitly for life support of these projects.
You can also just search 6min timer on duckduckgo, still works there
Brave search still works as well. Honestly, non search engine alternatives really are not equivalent. A timer is not important enouhgt for a bookmark or desktop icon.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=6%20minute%20timer
https://search.brave.com/search?q=6%20minute%20timer
The DDG one works okay but does not update in the page title like the Online Stopwatch one does, so it's a bit less convenient to quickly check how much time is left (or if it's expired and you didn't hear the sound) when the tab is somewhere in the background.
It does have a better UI and it's nice that it supports running multiple concurrent timers though.
Ideally it would support sending a browser push notification so you know the timer is done even if your volume happens to be on mute.
There's an iOS and macOS app called Due [1] that has all the bells and whistles if anyone else uses a lot of timers regularly.
[1]: https://www.dueapp.com/
It does have a better UI and it's nice that it supports running multiple concurrent timers though.
Ideally it would support sending a browser push notification so you know the timer is done even if your volume happens to be on mute.
There's an iOS and macOS app called Due [1] that has all the bells and whistles if anyone else uses a lot of timers regularly.
[1]: https://www.dueapp.com/
I’ve already stopped relying on Google. It’s too hard to tell the difference between a product they are going to support and a product they aren't. I don't want to have to pull up some financial statements just to understand if google is going to cancel some product I'm interested in within 2 years, I'm going to save my time and just go with somebody else.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
To be honest, the users should know going into google services things could be temporary
> "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
That kind of ethos used to exist at Google circa 2004 and was the way the majority of engineer and the few product manager behaved.
Very few of these folks are left and are a very tiny minority.
Most folks at Google these days don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thinking nor about the company itself, they're just here for the GSUs and the free food.
That kind of ethos used to exist at Google circa 2004 and was the way the majority of engineer and the few product manager behaved.
Very few of these folks are left and are a very tiny minority.
Most folks at Google these days don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thinking nor about the company itself, they're just here for the GSUs and the free food.
Some would argue that these "failures" due to "market forces" are simply an excuse, a ruse to cover up their monoplies elsewhere (i.e., search and ads).
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
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Top comment and reply in that thread:
> Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google. Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!
> Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.
Still a legitimate gripe nine years later, it seems...
> Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google. Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!
> Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.
Still a legitimate gripe nine years later, it seems...
Google are well known for the amount of services they deprecate [0], but what gets less attention is functionality they remove from their core search product. It seems like quite a few "advanced features" have been removed, including `link:` which I found extremely useful for finding web pages that link to a given URL, and for which I haven't found a decent alternative.
[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
Just this morning I was trying to show a friend a video of a man being cut out of a python (to prove the point they quite easily can eat a full grown human if big enough).
Having seen the video many times it should have been easy.
Nope.
8 pages with cutoutd for videos and gifs all of the exact same 'fail video' of apparently a person who attempted to be swallowed by one purposefully and chickened out.
200 hits on that one stupid video. Articles. Videos. Listicles.
Changed to duck duck go and it was the first freaking hit.
Old tech needs to die. All of faang especially are just dust, let them blow away.
Having seen the video many times it should have been easy.
Nope.
8 pages with cutoutd for videos and gifs all of the exact same 'fail video' of apparently a person who attempted to be swallowed by one purposefully and chickened out.
200 hits on that one stupid video. Articles. Videos. Listicles.
Changed to duck duck go and it was the first freaking hit.
Old tech needs to die. All of faang especially are just dust, let them blow away.
What kind of game are Google playing at? They’re like evolution at play and routinely prune and trim away anything not working for them. They’re so Darwinian.
When I was there (2007-2008), there was a popular phrase among the management class along the lines of "We like to measure things in the billions here." Meaning that if whatever project you're working on is going to last (e.g. get more funding, get more headcount, not get killed, etc...) it better have some extremely large and impressive internal metric (or have a credible growth plan to get there). Billions of users, billions of downloads, billions of dollars in revenue, etc. If something doesn't have that kind of metric, start the countdown timer...
When joined in they were on the tail end of sunsetting Google Code, which they explained was the smart thing to do because Google doesn’t want to waste its time on opportunities that aren’t measured in billions.
Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.
A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.
Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.
A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.
Google Code was great but the reason it sunset was because GitHub ate its lunch (just like Google Code ate Sourceforge before that). It would have distracted their resources to focus on that and the billions their spending to get developers on GCP are not influenced by the presence or lack of Google Code (which you can tell because Microsoft owns GitHub and that doesn’t meaningfully impact Azure)
> If something doesn't have that kind of metric, start the countdown timer...
I can’t. They killed that feature.
I can’t. They killed that feature.
Let's not sully the name of a good man [1].
Darwin was a balanced, caring and conscientiousness, highly complex figure who placed immense value in emotion, family, and ethics.
Google is cold, callous calculating machine that chews up its users and other businesses to sacrifice them on the alter of money.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...
Darwin was a balanced, caring and conscientiousness, highly complex figure who placed immense value in emotion, family, and ethics.
Google is cold, callous calculating machine that chews up its users and other businesses to sacrifice them on the alter of money.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...
The difference is that evolution is the only game in town (well, until humans started bio-engineering).
> well, until humans started bio-engineering
Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.
Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.
That's not true. Evolution happens under certain conditions. Rampant bio-engineering, of certain kinds, would remove us from the conditions under which evolution has any effect.
it's perhaps interesting to speculate in the possibility of a post-evolution (at least at organism level) regime in future, but mLuby said "started" so I think the correction was fine, if a bit at risk of falling into semantics.
RIP Google Timer, 2013-2022
To be fair though, the entries on killedbygoogle seem to average ~5 years before death. By that metric 9 years is a respectable run.
To be fair though, the entries on killedbygoogle seem to average ~5 years before death. By that metric 9 years is a respectable run.
Nine years, not a bad run in Google's terms. Which of course goes to show how low the bar is in terms of expecting Google to support things longterm.
Didn’t even get a “Our fantastic journey has come to an end” blog. Sad!
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A few years ago, Bing had a bunch of tools for developers: base64/HTML/URL codec, ASCII table, QR code generator, color picker, formatters, even the ability to run code in the browser on the servers of an online judge (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450385)
One day they all just disappeared. I actually wasn't the only one who noticed (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bing/what-h...)
I think I know why: the Bing blog implies that most of it was the passion project of a couple of summer interns in 2015. Probably it simply broke at some point, and no one was around to even notice.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/09/02/bing-rocks-two-new-...
https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/10/08/bing-adds-more-tool...
Here's a larger list of Bing's search features in various domains from 2018. Most are now inactive. There apparently was a timer as well. https://old.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/9oct9o/psa_search_for...
One day they all just disappeared. I actually wasn't the only one who noticed (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bing/what-h...)
I think I know why: the Bing blog implies that most of it was the passion project of a couple of summer interns in 2015. Probably it simply broke at some point, and no one was around to even notice.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/09/02/bing-rocks-two-new-...
https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/10/08/bing-adds-more-tool...
Here's a larger list of Bing's search features in various domains from 2018. Most are now inactive. There apparently was a timer as well. https://old.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/9oct9o/psa_search_for...
DuckDuckGo still supports all of those developer tools:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=base64+foo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+code+foo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=color+picker
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=json+formatter
Along with the timer from OP:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=6+minute+timer
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=base64+foo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+code+foo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=color+picker
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=json+formatter
Along with the timer from OP:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=6+minute+timer
If anyone is looking for these kinds of developer tools, here is my favorite, which I use on a daily basis: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
Based on the sources you linked, summer interns only worked on the guitar tuner and metronome functionality. I see no indication in the second blog post you linked that the same interns (or interns at all for that matter) had anything to do with the development of the color picker, encoders, etc.
We are working to bring all these tools to your regular search engine, checkout https://felvin.com
This is almost certainly an accident. I remember when the Search SRE team got paged because some simple math formula wasn't giving am answer box. Something like 42+7 giving 49. Turns out that this was getting classified as "porn seeking" and giving an empty results page if Safe Search was on. This probably would have never been noticed if there wasn't a end-to-end prober test because this particular formula was an example in the Google Home instruction pamphlet.
Search is very a complex system and quite possibly there is a poor SRE looking into this right now.
Search is very a complex system and quite possibly there is a poor SRE looking into this right now.
> Something like 42+7 giving 49. Turns out that this was getting classified as "porn seeking"
Sounds like the results were either 34 or 69, then...
Sounds like the results were either 34 or 69, then...
I don't remember if the exact cause was ever nailed down (Yay ML). One of the leading theories is that "42 7" (or whatever the formula was) was on some porn video descriptions. Who knows if that is what tipped the scales.
What is it with number 34? Google search gives some "angel numbers" and other numerology.
NSFW^
If that entirely textual Wikipedia article about a topic related to modern anthropology is considered not safe in your workplace, I'd be looking for a new job.
It's probably one the best known rules of the internet, or more like rules of /b/ (and now I'm breaking rules 1 and 2, but who cares)
How can you use internet without knowing its rules?
It’s Rule 34 (if it exists, there is porn with it).
It’s Rule 34 (if it exists, there is porn with it).
Thanks everyone, I knew about rule 34, but I never remembered its number.
It's been gone for a few months now, so it's not looking likely. Actually ended up writing my own which I now prefer, but I do hope you're correct since it's so useful to others.
Getting paged for that seems like a good way to kill employee motivation
Trusty metronome is still there tho: https://www.google.com/search?q=metronome
Not having the timer feels a little sad, but if Google had done this 6 months ago, someone could have raised a 5M seed round for a blockchain based distributed timer app...
Not having the timer feels a little sad, but if Google had done this 6 months ago, someone could have raised a 5M seed round for a blockchain based distributed timer app...
I ran into this a few days ago and figured I had done something wrong. Fortunately Duck Duck Go has an acceptable timer: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer
This is an unacceptable timer.
It loads an mp3 and js file when the timer completes. If the internet is not reliable at that moment, the timer will silently fail.
Positive: at least it will still ring if the timer skips over the exact second, such as with a date change or momentary stutter. Many online timers have this problem.
Prefer the Brave timer linked in a down-tree comment.
It loads an mp3 and js file when the timer completes. If the internet is not reliable at that moment, the timer will silently fail.
Positive: at least it will still ring if the timer skips over the exact second, such as with a date change or momentary stutter. Many online timers have this problem.
Prefer the Brave timer linked in a down-tree comment.
Doesn't play a sound for me until I focus the tab (using Brave).
That's a Brave (mis)feature, I tested and it works for me alt-tabbed out on Firefox.
It's a general problem for Chromium-based browsers. I also experience this with Vivaldi. It has something to do with the tabs sleeping.
Yeah has to be it.
Incidentally, Brave Search also has a timer widget.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=timer
https://search.brave.com/search?q=timer
This timer works well on Firefox. It has no issues with network unreliability or time changes.
So many of my professors have put this on the screen during an exam. Truly, a great blow to academia.
Can confirm! Not for exams, but for "let's breakout into projects and meet back in 15 minutes".
Shameless plug:
I created https://chronograph.io back in 2014 so people can share accurate, live stopwatches and timers. Other sites "share" by putting the start epoch & duration in a url querystring; Chronograph is one of the first to actually share a session with concurrent edits.
Of the years, it's found a variety of use cases:
- Online scrum meetings.
- Recording starts & stops of races when they're geographically separated.
- Coordination of breaks between language interpreters.
- Syncing of podcast recording with multiple guests.
- Video game twitchers to broadcast when they'll play
I created https://chronograph.io back in 2014 so people can share accurate, live stopwatches and timers. Other sites "share" by putting the start epoch & duration in a url querystring; Chronograph is one of the first to actually share a session with concurrent edits.
Of the years, it's found a variety of use cases:
- Online scrum meetings.
- Recording starts & stops of races when they're geographically separated.
- Coordination of breaks between language interpreters.
- Syncing of podcast recording with multiple guests.
- Video game twitchers to broadcast when they'll play
Tiny amount of UI feedback; I automatically wanted to click “cloud-synchronized” at the top to find out how it works technically, since the text is blue and I’d expect it to be a link.
May be better to just italicize or bold that rather than change the color. Or better yet, actually make it a link to a short “how does it work” page
May be better to just italicize or bold that rather than change the color. Or better yet, actually make it a link to a short “how does it work” page
I'll do that, thanks. I've never had feedback that's indicated people wanted to know.
It uses NTP's clock synchronization algorithm to get the servers' time. This is done over a websocket as it's twice as fast as a typical ajax request/response. Then all changes are made using the browser's idea of server time.
At the bottom of the page, you can see your computer/phone's time offset and precision.
It uses NTP's clock synchronization algorithm to get the servers' time. This is done over a websocket as it's twice as fast as a typical ajax request/response. Then all changes are made using the browser's idea of server time.
At the bottom of the page, you can see your computer/phone's time offset and precision.
Heh. This is the second time I've posted this in less than 24 hours, but it's relevant. I won't even apologize for the plug as it's not something I particularly care about.
In case you want to go old school, I made a clock. It's a PWA so you can use it as a widget or app. It's open source - just click "View Source". (Actually, I may have ripped off most of the code, I can't remember, so don't do that.)
Why? I like analog clocks to keep track of time. To me they're like moving pie charts. So I made this for myself and will bring it up on a second screen or an HDTV if I need it. You'd be surprised how useful it can be.
https://qidget.com/clock/
In case you want to go old school, I made a clock. It's a PWA so you can use it as a widget or app. It's open source - just click "View Source". (Actually, I may have ripped off most of the code, I can't remember, so don't do that.)
Why? I like analog clocks to keep track of time. To me they're like moving pie charts. So I made this for myself and will bring it up on a second screen or an HDTV if I need it. You'd be surprised how useful it can be.
https://qidget.com/clock/
It is beautiful!
That's a great service. I can think of various features to support more use cases:
* provide an optional label - for the use case where several clocks are used and shared.
* start and share several stop watches from a single page: start them one by one or together. For a race with multiple participants that either start sequentially or together.
* Support taking split times.
* Combine timer and stopwatch: count down from a set time, then start the stopwatch at zero. It currently does this already. This supports races like sailing where the actual start is preceded by a countdown period.
* provide an optional label - for the use case where several clocks are used and shared.
* start and share several stop watches from a single page: start them one by one or together. For a race with multiple participants that either start sequentially or together.
* Support taking split times.
* Combine timer and stopwatch: count down from a set time, then start the stopwatch at zero. It currently does this already. This supports races like sailing where the actual start is preceded by a countdown period.
Thanks for the feedback!
1) Click on the stopwatch timer title; you can edit it in place. Indeed, discovery of this is not great. My UX designs tends to be quite minimal. I'll try to make this more obvious.
2) I'm considering building use-case specific sites with the same backend to more adequately support each. I despise how many generic sites overload UI with junk aimed at certain power users for a use-case I don't have.
3) Splits are already supported for stopwatches.
4) This touches an occasionally requested feature of making sequential "entities" - most often in the context of circuit training. 5 minutes of bench pressing followed by 5 minutes of jumping jacks, etc. Allowing the addition of a stopwatch at the end of the sequence makes sense. Thanks
1) Click on the stopwatch timer title; you can edit it in place. Indeed, discovery of this is not great. My UX designs tends to be quite minimal. I'll try to make this more obvious.
2) I'm considering building use-case specific sites with the same backend to more adequately support each. I despise how many generic sites overload UI with junk aimed at certain power users for a use-case I don't have.
3) Splits are already supported for stopwatches.
4) This touches an occasionally requested feature of making sequential "entities" - most often in the context of circuit training. 5 minutes of bench pressing followed by 5 minutes of jumping jacks, etc. Allowing the addition of a stopwatch at the end of the sequence makes sense. Thanks
Just wondering, how do you keep the timer accurate?
That's weird.
Given how many other useful similar tools remain, it would seem extremely odd this was removed intentionally.
But on the other hand, given all of Google's infra/tests/quality/etc., it would also be extremely odd for this to be removed by accident.
Maybe some component being deprecated internally meant this was easier to shut down than upgrade, but for a feature this simple that wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
This is... kinda baffling, to be honest.
Given how many other useful similar tools remain, it would seem extremely odd this was removed intentionally.
But on the other hand, given all of Google's infra/tests/quality/etc., it would also be extremely odd for this to be removed by accident.
Maybe some component being deprecated internally meant this was easier to shut down than upgrade, but for a feature this simple that wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
This is... kinda baffling, to be honest.
Search is a very old codebase comprised of several large monoliths that are mostly tested by end-to-end diffs.
There is no central repository of all search features and if the timer is tested, it is likely forced to trigger with debug flags.
For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
There is no central repository of all search features and if the timer is tested, it is likely forced to trigger with debug flags.
For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
Is it possible Google removed the timer because of the EU DMA? If the widget was a search result, it seems like that would be a violation of the new legislation, along with other things people have mentioned disappearing in this thread.
It also would explain why the DDG one remains, as they don't meet the definition of a gatekeeper.
It also would explain why the DDG one remains, as they don't meet the definition of a gatekeeper.
If this were the case, they would've used it as a PR opportunity to bash the legislation. It wouldn't have happened silently.
> they would've used it as a PR opportunity to bash the legislation
To what end? Needlessly pissing off lawmakers isn’t a smart strategy.
To what end? Needlessly pissing off lawmakers isn’t a smart strategy.
But they're already known to do exactly that. Here's how a lobbying group representing Google, among other companies, went full scaremongering in reaction to a proposed anti-trust law:
https://inv.riverside.rocks/jXf04bhcjbg?t=1297
https://inv.riverside.rocks/jXf04bhcjbg?t=1297
Oh, sorry, forgot this hasn’t passed yet. Yes, they should be doing that regardless.
It's basically their goto strategy though. For instance, responding to third party payment provider laws by saying "okay, but you still have to pay us 27% anyways" is pretty much purposely intended to respond by following the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, forcing lawmakers to go back and be even more clear on the demand.
They know the law was intended to address their abusive pricing arrangements, but they decided, of course, to thumb their nose at it and add a new "platform fee" instead.
They know the law was intended to address their abusive pricing arrangements, but they decided, of course, to thumb their nose at it and add a new "platform fee" instead.
I’m not sure of that, tit for tat does well as a strategy. Also lawmakers change every so often and usually love to pick over the negatives from their predecessor’s time and do things differently.
I think in such a legislation it has to be clearly defined what a "search result" is I'd be surprised if the legislation would count the timer widget as such.
> For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
Does Google really not have some sort of "Always rank this result first" flag?
Does Google really not have some sort of "Always rank this result first" flag?
Back in their Don't Be Evil days they actually clamped down on another part of Google that gamed their search results: https://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-1...
Yeah well... Those days are long gone. :-/
I'm sure they did at some point, but worth noting that prioritizing Google's own tools have been challenged in EU courts for being anti-competitive.
Does that mean if you play with results per page P, and get it to land on the P+1 position, you might be able to coax it back into being? ^^ Or maybe you can pick "results from custom range" to a couple weeks ago when it was still active? ;p ;) xx ;p
> There is no central repository of all search features
huh so I suppose it’s possible there are ghost features no one maintains but might still work?
huh so I suppose it’s possible there are ghost features no one maintains but might still work?
An approximate ratio of the prevalence of feature without a dedicated team (or singleton) would be 99/100.
That said we could argue for days about what a feature is.
That said we could argue for days about what a feature is.
I'm less interested in what a feature is, and more curious if there's some exhaustive list internally - or if there's even awareness of all of them spread throughout the corporation.
That is, in a large org like google (or msft, or...), how much stuff is there that no current employees are aware of?
I work at a relatively small company for a number of years, and it's definitely been a challenge to maintain knowledge of feature creep that has occurred, let alone anything more in depth like what the features were _supposed_ to do.
That is, in a large org like google (or msft, or...), how much stuff is there that no current employees are aware of?
I work at a relatively small company for a number of years, and it's definitely been a challenge to maintain knowledge of feature creep that has occurred, let alone anything more in depth like what the features were _supposed_ to do.
Building a registry has been very seriously attempted at least twice but ended with the acceptance of the futility of the endeavor.
Maybe the only person interested in maintaining it left the company.
No one gets promoted for maintaining the timer widget on Google search.
One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -
“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”
I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.
This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.
Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.
What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.
One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -
“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”
I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.
This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.
Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.
What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.
Why don't just work on current position? I'm working as a programmer for 15 years and I'm trying my best to evade any kinds of promotions because my salary suits me and additional responsibilities will detract me from writing code.
Those people who don't get promoted are fired?
Those people who don't get promoted are fired?
It’s a very cultural thing. If you’re very experienced and still “only” a senior engineer you can almost sense people wondering
“Why are you still here ?”
Rachel Kroll explains it well here https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/
“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.
As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?
Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.
The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.
The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”
“Why are you still here ?”
Rachel Kroll explains it well here https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/
“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.
As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?
Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.
The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.
The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”
I think this must be a relatively “new-ish” thing. When I got into this industry, in the middle 2000s, there was still the image of the “old beard” inside the company that was getting things actually done, and that was fine, one needn’t be a “director of” or a VP, just “programmer” was enough.
I now realize that worldview was on its last days, soon enough (I’d say 2007-2008) we started talking about “ninja” and “rockstar” programmers, first in the context of RoR but then it extended, gradually but surely, to almost all of the industry. And then lots and lots of money started becoming available via FAANG-like companies (I’d say starting around 2013-2014, something like that) and all this worldview was dialed up to one thousand.
I now realize that worldview was on its last days, soon enough (I’d say 2007-2008) we started talking about “ninja” and “rockstar” programmers, first in the context of RoR but then it extended, gradually but surely, to almost all of the industry. And then lots and lots of money started becoming available via FAANG-like companies (I’d say starting around 2013-2014, something like that) and all this worldview was dialed up to one thousand.
There is still an “old beard”, it’s just expectation that if you are an old beard getting stuff done you’re an L6+ instead of just senior. No one would look down on a wisen old senior principle.
A lot of large companies have an Up or Out policy. If you haven't reached a 'terminal level', your position has an expiration date, if it expires before you've been promoted, you get put on a path to being fired. If you've reached a terminal level, then you're ok, but it's hard to be stable in a position in a company of chaos and churn.
It is possible to do that past a certain level, and some people do. But I think the reason this isn't the predominant strategy is that there's a selection bias at play. The kinds of people who are ambitious enough to get a job at Google are also likely to always want the next job up, or if that isn't going smoothly, to move up by moving out.
If you're at a lower level, companies like this have an up or out policy -- if you don't get promoted in a certain timespan, they let you go.
If you're at a higher level, even if you're content with your position, your manager is rated on how many people earn promotions.
If you're at a higher level, even if you're content with your position, your manager is rated on how many people earn promotions.
The way you get promoted for maintaining the timer widget is to create some platform which drastically minimizes search features maintenance costs and tooling that largely automigrates legacy features onto it. Easy path to Google fellow if you can do it.
Sometimes I feel there are more platforms than products.
The best platforms are those that build a single product. Then we can argue for days about whether it's the platform teams responsibility to do X or the product engineering teams responsibility.
In close second are the platforms that are used for a fraction of a product and will never be wholely migrated onto because they are not fit for purpose.
Third place goes to the platforms that never actually have any product built on top of them - a theme so exciting people love recreating it at there own workplace.
We're all just temporarily embarrassed Linus Torvalds that want the world to build on our apis.
In close second are the platforms that are used for a fraction of a product and will never be wholely migrated onto because they are not fit for purpose.
Third place goes to the platforms that never actually have any product built on top of them - a theme so exciting people love recreating it at there own workplace.
We're all just temporarily embarrassed Linus Torvalds that want the world to build on our apis.
"Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit."
I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.
I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.
I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed. There are so many search features that no one can count them (people were proud about that and also the fact there was no list of all of them).
Most likely a ranking change is stopping the feature from being triggered. Someone will read this and it'll be silently fixed in a week or 2.
Most likely a ranking change is stopping the feature from being triggered. Someone will read this and it'll be silently fixed in a week or 2.
> I'd be shocked that it was purposefully removed.
Why? They've done this time and time again. Google is its own worst enemy in this respect. I have our whole company standardized on Google because I still see them as the least bad option but I live in fear of losing some critical functionality because of an 'upgrade'.
Why? They've done this time and time again. Google is its own worst enemy in this respect. I have our whole company standardized on Google because I still see them as the least bad option but I live in fear of losing some critical functionality because of an 'upgrade'.
Because I have first hand experience on a good swath of the search stack. Shuttering a standalone product is mostly an organizational effort. Removing a search feature is a coding adventure. One feature is sprinkled across the code base like pixie dust, magically becoming a count down timer to serve a users query. It is simply too high a cost to go and remove a single feature. It is also highly unlikely that leadership would approve bricking a swath of search features for technical reasons, it is just not in the organizational culture.
It's a bug that'll be fixed when someone notices.
It's a bug that'll be fixed when someone notices.
Can you explain how a timer could be complex, apart from impressively bad engineering?
First you need to understand that the intent of the query string is to set a timer. Human language is ambiguous so there can be many competing interpretations.
Then you have to take all the intentions and ask backends to fulfill them with their actual results
Then you sort the result by the correct order for the user.
Then you need to render the search page. At this points some results may not want to be present anymore because they are not the top result.
That's a 50'000 foot approximation of what happens when you query Google. The process has tons more complexity as you zoom in.
It is amazing engineering, but probably not the first way you'd go about implementing a count down timer.
Then you have to take all the intentions and ask backends to fulfill them with their actual results
Then you sort the result by the correct order for the user.
Then you need to render the search page. At this points some results may not want to be present anymore because they are not the top result.
That's a 50'000 foot approximation of what happens when you query Google. The process has tons more complexity as you zoom in.
It is amazing engineering, but probably not the first way you'd go about implementing a count down timer.
I’d say using tons of “amazing engineering” to implement something that’s functionally equivalent to a trivial shell script is a rather poor engineering.
I am honestly confused how people have so little experience and empathy for engineering, even on a forum like this.
Do you actually work somewhere where you're providing one of the most-used services in the world and it's held together by "trivial shell scripts"? Do you really think people at Google are so bad at their jobs that they went "Well, this is 4 lines of Bash, but I could make this needlessly complex for no reason" It's not as if they're the height of engineering, but the arrogance to just assume that there's no reasonable factors that may have not lead them to doing something more simply is so foreign to me.
Do you actually work somewhere where you're providing one of the most-used services in the world and it's held together by "trivial shell scripts"? Do you really think people at Google are so bad at their jobs that they went "Well, this is 4 lines of Bash, but I could make this needlessly complex for no reason" It's not as if they're the height of engineering, but the arrogance to just assume that there's no reasonable factors that may have not lead them to doing something more simply is so foreign to me.
It’s not that I lack empathy - I know many of those folks, and I’d work there if I wanted to. It’s just that an empathy towards Lenin bust factory workers doesn’t make their hard work any more useful.
You’re confused, because you got it exactly backwards - most technical people who work this kind of jobs lack the big picture required to realize that the vast majority of their work is just technological debt. And some others that do get it also understand the business part - and while this overcomplication is bad technologically and user-wise, it might make sense to business.
Also, let me remind you that those “most-used services” are generally of quite poor quality, both in terms of reliability and user experience. There are services that do matter - ads and tracking - and I’m guessing those are more cared about, but I’m not talking about them.
You’re confused, because you got it exactly backwards - most technical people who work this kind of jobs lack the big picture required to realize that the vast majority of their work is just technological debt. And some others that do get it also understand the business part - and while this overcomplication is bad technologically and user-wise, it might make sense to business.
Also, let me remind you that those “most-used services” are generally of quite poor quality, both in terms of reliability and user experience. There are services that do matter - ads and tracking - and I’m guessing those are more cared about, but I’m not talking about them.
I just don't think this meshes with any of my experience talking with people who work at places like Google. Your argument keeps being "but Google is bad and what it makes is useless, therefore the code behind it is terrible and made by people who can't think".
Working at places with a lot of tech debt, or where you're creating tech debt knowingly is just the state of the industry at almost every company. I've never met a developer who doesn't see that, let alone "most technical people". This entire thread is full of current and ex-Google employees saying essentially "Yea, this is probably because of tech debt and sprawl". If you deigned to go work at Google some day, it's not as if you'd be able to just untangle all of it with a few bash scripts even if they made you King of Google.
I have no love for Google's products myself, but it's mystifying to me when you let your clear distaste for some of their decisions and priority cloud your view of what they've created and maintain. When was the last time Google Search or Gmail was unreliable for more than an hour? Maybe once in the last 2 years? That doesn't even come close to any objective measurement of "quite poor ... reliability". Even if you and I seemingly don't like their services, it's just willfully blind to say that what they provide isn't useful to millions or billions of people.
Working at places with a lot of tech debt, or where you're creating tech debt knowingly is just the state of the industry at almost every company. I've never met a developer who doesn't see that, let alone "most technical people". This entire thread is full of current and ex-Google employees saying essentially "Yea, this is probably because of tech debt and sprawl". If you deigned to go work at Google some day, it's not as if you'd be able to just untangle all of it with a few bash scripts even if they made you King of Google.
I have no love for Google's products myself, but it's mystifying to me when you let your clear distaste for some of their decisions and priority cloud your view of what they've created and maintain. When was the last time Google Search or Gmail was unreliable for more than an hour? Maybe once in the last 2 years? That doesn't even come close to any objective measurement of "quite poor ... reliability". Even if you and I seemingly don't like their services, it's just willfully blind to say that what they provide isn't useful to millions or billions of people.
My argument keeps being “if you have an incredibly complex mechanism working at best marginally worse than an extremely simple mechanism, then something’s not right with your design”. Regarding Google employees, what I wrote is close to the exact opposite of what you claim above, so…
>tech debt is everywhere
The point isn’t that there’s a lot of debt there - it’s about the speed of adding new debt vs actual functionality, which in turn comes from mistaking adding complexity for improvement.
>unreliable for more than hour
You’re talking about availability, aka “appearing to work”. What I’m talking about is reliability, aka “does it actually work”. Not does it fail for more than hour at a time, but how often does it fail at all. You need to count the forced reloads we’ve all learned to do automatically at this point. And I’d definitely remember last time mutt(1) failed on me, and I honestly don’t; I’m guessing sometime last decade. Except intermittent IMAP connection problems… to GMail. (For which mutt already got workarounds; it’s not like anyone expects Google to fix their servers.)
(And sure, my mutt was configured some eight laptops ago, but it just so happens it’s the same for my Gmail account.)
>tech debt is everywhere
The point isn’t that there’s a lot of debt there - it’s about the speed of adding new debt vs actual functionality, which in turn comes from mistaking adding complexity for improvement.
>unreliable for more than hour
You’re talking about availability, aka “appearing to work”. What I’m talking about is reliability, aka “does it actually work”. Not does it fail for more than hour at a time, but how often does it fail at all. You need to count the forced reloads we’ve all learned to do automatically at this point. And I’d definitely remember last time mutt(1) failed on me, and I honestly don’t; I’m guessing sometime last decade. Except intermittent IMAP connection problems… to GMail. (For which mutt already got workarounds; it’s not like anyone expects Google to fix their servers.)
(And sure, my mutt was configured some eight laptops ago, but it just so happens it’s the same for my Gmail account.)
The point is that it's not really the timer that's complex. It's the path taken to determine that a timer should be displayed in response to a search query. The timer itself is presumably fairly trivial.
Because the complexity isn't in the timer, but in adding it to an otherwise massive pile of code that makes the rest of everything run. It's like if you're building a hotel with hundreds of rooms and you decide every room should have an installed alarm clock. The clock mechanism itself you can buy cheaply, but if you want it to look good, match your decor, and not have wires exposed, it's suddenly harder.
If it was just a single-use page on timer.google.com, you'd be totally right. But having Search know that "5 minute timer" should show a timer, but "Egg timer" should show a picture of a product, and "new year's eve countdown" should probably give you a timer/countdown, but only on some days of the year, and on others it should be to videos of last year's.
If it was just a single-use page on timer.google.com, you'd be totally right. But having Search know that "5 minute timer" should show a timer, but "Egg timer" should show a picture of a product, and "new year's eve countdown" should probably give you a timer/countdown, but only on some days of the year, and on others it should be to videos of last year's.
In your example this “decor” is an improvement: it makes using it nicer. Can you tell me how this “fantastic engineering” makes google timer nicer? Because to me it isn’t quite obvious; what is obvious is how it makes it worse, by lowering reliability and invading privacy.
I don't even know what you're trying to say here? If anything, the "decor" in my hotel room metaphor was a metaphor for... decor? I could make a timer that outputs ASCII text for the countdown, but if I put that as the first result in a Google Search results page, it would look weird and out of place. As far as I know, Google having consistent CSS doesn't lower their reliability and invade my privacy.
There was never a Google Timer that wasn't a part of search, so it always was going to need to integrate with search. If you just want a website to load with a timer, there's plenty of other options.
I get it, you don't like Google, you think they make products that are bad for people and privacy. All of that I mostly agree with. That's a set of complaints that, as far as I can tell, have no relation to if Google Search still has a timer feature. Even if they stripped out all of the tracking and whatever you think is making them not have "reliability", the remaining search engine would still be an impressive and hard to integrate with bit of code. You see this in the cost to develop and run services like Kagi or the belated Runnaroo search engine, both of which were far better about personal privacy and, amusingly, less reliable than Google.
There was never a Google Timer that wasn't a part of search, so it always was going to need to integrate with search. If you just want a website to load with a timer, there's plenty of other options.
I get it, you don't like Google, you think they make products that are bad for people and privacy. All of that I mostly agree with. That's a set of complaints that, as far as I can tell, have no relation to if Google Search still has a timer feature. Even if they stripped out all of the tracking and whatever you think is making them not have "reliability", the remaining search engine would still be an impressive and hard to integrate with bit of code. You see this in the cost to develop and run services like Kagi or the belated Runnaroo search engine, both of which were far better about personal privacy and, amusingly, less reliable than Google.
So it takes fantastic engineering to fetch a value from a single input box and then echo a string with some CSS around it? :-D
Once again - instead of reasoning about the usual piece of the stack try to understand the whole thing - from users’ intent to use it all the way to the timer going off. This is a tiny bit of a 10£ Casio functionality. You shouldn’t need datacentres to replicate that.
Once again - instead of reasoning about the usual piece of the stack try to understand the whole thing - from users’ intent to use it all the way to the timer going off. This is a tiny bit of a 10£ Casio functionality. You shouldn’t need datacentres to replicate that.
> both of which were far better about personal privacy and, amusingly, less reliable than Google.
Less reliable in what way?
Less reliable in what way?
In every way. Any Google service can fail for a myriad of reasons, from internet connection problems to some random failure of one of billion fantastic engineering pieces involved, to Google blocking your account for whatever reason, to Google deprecating the service.
Compare this with failure modes for the date(1) utility, or a Casio watch, or the default one in your phone.
It might be more illustrative to use some more complicated service. Compared with VLC, reliability of YouTube is a joke.
Compare this with failure modes for the date(1) utility, or a Casio watch, or the default one in your phone.
It might be more illustrative to use some more complicated service. Compared with VLC, reliability of YouTube is a joke.
A lot of these "Falsehoods programmers believe about time"
apply to making a timer:
https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
Honestly, that’s another argument against Google timer: you can’t assume it’s correct, because you don’t have any insight into its internal operation. Most people assume it can’t be bad, because Google is big and rich and popular, but both theory (argument from authority) and experience show it doesn’t hold water.
Building something I agree with you, that's difficult. Shutting something down is a one bit affair. After that how long you take to remove the now dead code is an entirely different matter.
Tell this to Google Reader.
Not that I'm bitter, or anything.
Not that I'm bitter, or anything.
It may just be down temporarily.
I used to use this Google Search timer extensively until there was a period of time (years ago) where it didn't work reliably for me - I think it counted down fine but then played no sound. Unsure if this affected others but I had to abandon it.
Funnily enough, the Google Clock timer on my phone (which I set via Google Assistant) has had a similar intermittent issue lately. It would count down to 0 properly, and then just continue past that to -1, -2, -3 seconds, on and on, and end up playing the alert audio like 2 minutes late. Weirdly, it knows that this is happening as there is no normal 'dismiss' option until the sound actually starts playing.
Not the biggest deal when it's my coffee timer being a bit late, but if it's for something more time-sensitive in the oven it does actually matter.
I used to use this Google Search timer extensively until there was a period of time (years ago) where it didn't work reliably for me - I think it counted down fine but then played no sound. Unsure if this affected others but I had to abandon it.
Funnily enough, the Google Clock timer on my phone (which I set via Google Assistant) has had a similar intermittent issue lately. It would count down to 0 properly, and then just continue past that to -1, -2, -3 seconds, on and on, and end up playing the alert audio like 2 minutes late. Weirdly, it knows that this is happening as there is no normal 'dismiss' option until the sound actually starts playing.
Not the biggest deal when it's my coffee timer being a bit late, but if it's for something more time-sensitive in the oven it does actually matter.
DuckDuckGo has a very nice timer:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer+&t=newext&atb=v265-1&ia=answ...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer+&t=newext&atb=v265-1&ia=answ...
At this point I'd recommend Brave Search for all things, including timer!
https://search.brave.com/search?q=timer+for+30+seconds&sourc...
The search is distinct as opposed to largely relying on Bing, and I find the fact that DDG decided to start 'down-ranking Russian disinformation' troubling. If Iraq had had a comparable Western facing media machine as Russia, their claims, that they had no WMD and the war was being waged on false premises, would have undoubtedly also been labeled as disinformation and ultimately widely censored as well. It's quite dystopic.
[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
https://search.brave.com/search?q=timer+for+30+seconds&sourc...
The search is distinct as opposed to largely relying on Bing, and I find the fact that DDG decided to start 'down-ranking Russian disinformation' troubling. If Iraq had had a comparable Western facing media machine as Russia, their claims, that they had no WMD and the war was being waged on false premises, would have undoubtedly also been labeled as disinformation and ultimately widely censored as well. It's quite dystopic.
[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
Don’t worry, The top DDG hit for “neo-Nazis had taken over Ukraine's Rada” has been spreading Russian propaganda since at least 2018 (according to Wikipedia).
DDG’s “downranking” of such things just means they’re not exclusively showing Russian sockpuppet propaganda sites now.
(The Rada thing was the top result of my search for examples of Russian propaganda in the US. If there’s some other Russian propaganda you’re worried might be censored, feel free to check DDG then post an example.)
Edit: Also, I distinctly remember CBS and NPR both pointing out that the Iraqi WMD lab was actually just a dairy delivery train car, as did a sizable minority of the senate. The main issue was that we had a propagandist in the White House, and the outlets that Russia currently is supporting helped push the WMD agenda.
DDG’s “downranking” of such things just means they’re not exclusively showing Russian sockpuppet propaganda sites now.
(The Rada thing was the top result of my search for examples of Russian propaganda in the US. If there’s some other Russian propaganda you’re worried might be censored, feel free to check DDG then post an example.)
Edit: Also, I distinctly remember CBS and NPR both pointing out that the Iraqi WMD lab was actually just a dairy delivery train car, as did a sizable minority of the senate. The main issue was that we had a propagandist in the White House, and the outlets that Russia currently is supporting helped push the WMD agenda.
Often in memory we tend to make things from the past much nicer than they were. Here are a couple of interesting articles:
Washington Post - "Irrefutableable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
NYTimes - "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
Those articles, alongside that war, played a large role in shaping my entire worldview. I come back and read them every once in a while.
Washington Post - "Irrefutableable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
NYTimes - "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
Those articles, alongside that war, played a large role in shaping my entire worldview. I come back and read them every once in a while.
You have probably read it, but if not, you might like to read "Manufacturing Consent", which discusses much the same behaviour in various previous western wars. The whole Iraq thing played out just like Chomsky and Herman wrote: leadership wanted a war and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
If you follow the ISW Ukraine updates¹ then you will see them calling this "setting conditions" when Russia does it.
¹ https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-confli...
ETA: no idea why we're discussing this on a thread about Google timers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you follow the ISW Ukraine updates¹ then you will see them calling this "setting conditions" when Russia does it.
¹ https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-confli...
ETA: no idea why we're discussing this on a thread about Google timers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These are both opinion pieces and not the editorial boards thankfully, but they don't exactly have spotless records their either.
Also, neither were as reputable as CBS or NPR at the time. (And as for suggestions I misremembered it; I certainly did not. NPR covered it for at least a week on my way into work, and I distinctly remember where I was when I watched the TV reports with the photos.)
Triangle solver on the search results page is also gone. Here's how it previously looked like: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-geometry-cal...
Still there for me but I’m on mobile.
Let me take this opportunity to introduce you to one of my all-time favorite Mac apps https://github.com/kristopherjohnson/MenubarCountdown
It performs its job perfectly.
It performs its job perfectly.
One of my all-time favorite Mac apps is also a timer, input via mouse instead of typing:
http://maddin.io/gestimer/
http://maddin.io/gestimer/
I used to use this as my pomodoro timer. Why do you be like that google..
https://pomofocus.io/ is a nice-looking website with Pomodoro timers.
That is a nice design! It’s cool that one can download the app for desktops.
I made a shared timer (not nearly as pretty) a few years back, with live URLs and admin login codes for controls. Intended for LARP leaders or fitness coaches.
Unfortunately never deployed, but works using Elixir, LiveView, and ETS in-memory DB. https://github.com/mvellandi/easy_timer
I made a shared timer (not nearly as pretty) a few years back, with live URLs and admin login codes for controls. Intended for LARP leaders or fitness coaches.
Unfortunately never deployed, but works using Elixir, LiveView, and ETS in-memory DB. https://github.com/mvellandi/easy_timer
You're using google less, that's good afaik
I’ve found DuckDuckGo’s timer to be useful. I just type “15 minute timer” into my address bar and go about my business.
Is it a feature that has gone app only? I can’t imagine you can no longer say “hey google set a 5 minute timer” since that’s one of the key use cases of digital assistants.
You used to be able to search “ip address” and get it direct. That also disappeared maybe a year or so ago. Annoying as all the other major hits at covered in ads.
The query "my ip address" still works for me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=my+ip+address
https://www.google.com/search?q=my+ip+address
That still works thanks :)
Gotta get that adsense revenue
"Remind me to <thing> at <time>" has been dead for a while now too. I would use this several times daily.
Can tell Siri to remind you instead. Probably covers 75% of my Siri usage, with the remainder being: asking about the weather, turning lights on / off, and disabling Wi-Fi (as opposed to the soft disable nonsense Apple rolled out years ago)
What do you mean? This still works fine with Google Assistant.
It works fine with Google Assistant, but not Google search. It used to be so easy (on desktop at least) to open a new browser tab, type "remind me to..." and click Enter. The experience was so seamless, and I could set reminders without my fingers ever leaving my keyboard.
DuckDuckGo has a nice timer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=25+minutes+timer&hps=1&atb=v325-1&...
Recently I've started using Kagi (I love it) and I am slightly dissapointed that it does not have any.
Recently I've started using Kagi (I love it) and I am slightly dissapointed that it does not have any.
Search based things come and go and quite randomly, I've found. "£1 in $" is a search I've used perhaps 1000+ times over the years and while it's been consistent for the past year or so, it often used to not return the currency conversion (but alternatives like "1 GBP in USD" did, etc.)
That's usually a ranking problem. Search is one big ranking system even for these custom looking responses. Sometimes they mess those up, or the backend that replies with them is down (ex. They accidentally took down weather once for the whole world).
I kinda like Google not doing everything. When google starts to do all the little services like timers, conversions, speed tests there isn't any room for anyone else. I just wish the alternatives weren't so scummy.
Unless it was found late, I guess it's not an intentional launch but a bug. Today is Sunday and I believe Search prohibits making any significant production changes from happening Friday~Sunday.
Imagine removing a timer that helps all types of professions(teachers, parents, therapists, etc) to make more money.
Almost as if the mission statements conflict with each other to the point where a creator’s timer on YouTube leads to more selling of ads and thus makes them incentivized to remove it from search entirely.
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach
Hopefully is a fluke. I’ll be moving on if it’s not.
Almost as if the mission statements conflict with each other to the point where a creator’s timer on YouTube leads to more selling of ads and thus makes them incentivized to remove it from search entirely.
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach
Hopefully is a fluke. I’ll be moving on if it’s not.
https://www.timer-tab.com/ open source and you can customise it to any YouTube video you want, like a nightingale song for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XdlIbNrki5o
This could be due to this functionality moving to the Google Assistant.
If you have a Pixel phone, you can have two "Google search bars". I have one at the top of my homescreen (Google Search) and one at the bottom (Google Assistant). The one at the top sometime can't handle tasks like "set a timer"!
IIRC, Search and Assistant used to be almost identical, but they keep diverging.
If you have a Pixel phone, you can have two "Google search bars". I have one at the top of my homescreen (Google Search) and one at the bottom (Google Assistant). The one at the top sometime can't handle tasks like "set a timer"!
IIRC, Search and Assistant used to be almost identical, but they keep diverging.
I've used https://e.ggtimer.com/6m30s for years
Search Engine Roundtable reported it on July 21st (crediting Deccan Herald from the 20th) and said that Danny Sullivan is looking into it:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-timer-stopwatch-s...
Unit conversions are far less useful now, too.
"X bytes to {kilo,mega,giga}bytes" never, ever works for me. Every single time I have to manually fix the input and output units.
What do you mean? Frink is still up! https://frinklang.org/fsp/frink.fsp
Tip calculator has been gone for a bit too.
Still showing up for me?
https://www.google.com/search?q=tip+calculator
https://www.google.com/search?q=tip+calculator
You’re right. What has broken is searching “20% tip on $20.00” or similar. That used to automatically prefill the tip calculator.
I had some fun making this over the past few hours: https://tocktimer.com
It's a bit rough around the edges still, but I'll try to improve it a bunch over the next few days, especially so if Google are not bringing back their timer.
It's a bit rough around the edges still, but I'll try to improve it a bunch over the next few days, especially so if Google are not bringing back their timer.
They are holding it hostage. When leap seconds are no longer a thing they will bring it back.
I've hacked together my own replacement, as a mini project on my blog:
https://arthurdick.com/blog/timer/
https://arthurdick.com/blog/timer/
I've noticed it stopped working about a month ago. That's why I made my own: https://github.com/thement/figlet-timer
It would be nice if this was a link that explained what happened. Right now the link is to search and that didn't tell me anything. Presumably it used to pop up a timer, but how am I supposed to know that?
Nothing of value was lost, considering that opening after opening google.com you have to dismiss cookies page, and do it every time if you, as you should, use google.com in private mode.
What was that people were saying about Google doing things different with their C++ replacement?
This right here is just one more reason why I will never trust google.
If it's not ads it's not pertinent.
This right here is just one more reason why I will never trust google.
If it's not ads it's not pertinent.
I was planning on creating a timer on my home page anyway. At the very least I'm thankful for google for the timer. It has served me well on many occasions. Rest in peace.
They are repurposing it for their International Timer Day doodle.
more like it's moved directly and solely into Google Assistant options. This is for a number of handy utilities that used to be available directly from search. Another example is ability to set a calendar reminder directly from a search "remind me tuesday at 8am". Annoying but part of larger push to funnel all of these queries that started as search into Assistant. (annoying because why do I have to use voice to do the query etc)
I work for Google Search. Yes, we’ve been looking into this.
thank god honestly
i really dislike the prospect of a search engine turning into a one-stop shop; im convinced (intuitively, with absolutely zero hard evidence), that settling on an instinctive default of "punch it into google" rots the brain, maybe because when i was young my dad asked why the hell i was typing $WEBSITE into the browser search bar (remember when those were separate?) instead of just entering website.com directly into the url bar
i really dislike the prospect of a search engine turning into a one-stop shop; im convinced (intuitively, with absolutely zero hard evidence), that settling on an instinctive default of "punch it into google" rots the brain, maybe because when i was young my dad asked why the hell i was typing $WEBSITE into the browser search bar (remember when those were separate?) instead of just entering website.com directly into the url bar
Heh, the first result now is a YouTube view w/ ads.
FYI Windows has a built in tool "Alarms & Clock", which includes a Clock, Timer and Stopwatch. I use it pretty much every day.
Google seems to have shut down the integrated timer .
I used this all the time when teaching! Why, Google?
No love for https://e.ggtimer.com/6minutes ?
Had noticed their 'mortgage calculator' had disappeared for a few months, at least in the UK. It's since been revived.
Why wouldn’t they remove it? It’s in their best interest to send you to an alternative page where they can show you advertisements.
This is probably a temporary glitch. Google search is a complicated ecosystem, and fails gracefully.
My guess is it'll be back up by Monday.
My guess is it'll be back up by Monday.
I didn't even know that was a thing.
Now that it's on the front page of HN, it will probably be fixed and come back within two workdays.
lol, past few days I've missed this. Was always the most convenient way for me to set a tea timer.
I guess I need to roll my own timer.
Workaround: macOS Ventura has a Clock.app including a Timer. It can be set from Spotlight.
Ditto for stopwatch. Whyyyyyyy?
Google Home is still doing timers, which happens to be my main use case for it.
[deleted]
Sounds like this was the first thing Google killed in its Simplicity Sprint.
Take away inbox and rss reader but at least leave the timer!
I’m told this saves 200k stopwatches per financial quarter
I work for Google Search. Yes, we’re looking into this.
Probably couldn't find a way of monetizing it.
As an ex-teacher, I hope this comes back.
killedbygoogle.com Claims another victim
You can’t trust Google. Period.
Still works on duck duck go. :)
M-x org-timer-set-timer then.
did... this have a cost?
are there any savings at all?
Setting something like this up encrusted in enough process to ensure that it won't disappear a few million commits later would certainly cost a lot. It can only be cheap of it's allowed to disappear.
"Google does not care about their users". Well.. I am not sure about that, but there is always the option of not using Google products, or using as few as possible Google products.
- I've closed my G Suite legacy free edition (as opposed to transitioning to paid)
- I've moved away and stopped using Gmail, Drive, Photos and Keep
I am still using maps & youtube - these are a bit tricky to replace.
No hard-feelings, Google is no longer the company/innovator it used to be (remember back on 2005 got an invitation for gmail, and I was over the moon).
- I've closed my G Suite legacy free edition (as opposed to transitioning to paid)
- I've moved away and stopped using Gmail, Drive, Photos and Keep
I am still using maps & youtube - these are a bit tricky to replace.
No hard-feelings, Google is no longer the company/innovator it used to be (remember back on 2005 got an invitation for gmail, and I was over the moon).
Obviously it's not a big deal if you're already intentionally moving away from Google, but one of the oddest things about the legacy free G Suite changes is that after months and months of upheaval and uncertainty, they just allowed personal-use users to keep it indefinitely anyway.
I half wonder if it was a purposeful scheme to knock out the biggest users and have them "voluntarily" migrate while ultimately not booting off those who waited around and were the most averse to change. But it really didn't feel like strategy, more like lurching between possible ways forward.
Google is definitely getting out of all those spaces where it just "generously" allowed free stuff all over the place: obviously the shuttering of many services, but the things like G Suite and Maps billing and the general crackdown on storage... I don't think the economics of the business really required such changes but it's more a philosophical change? Or preparing for leaner times ahead?
I half wonder if it was a purposeful scheme to knock out the biggest users and have them "voluntarily" migrate while ultimately not booting off those who waited around and were the most averse to change. But it really didn't feel like strategy, more like lurching between possible ways forward.
Google is definitely getting out of all those spaces where it just "generously" allowed free stuff all over the place: obviously the shuttering of many services, but the things like G Suite and Maps billing and the general crackdown on storage... I don't think the economics of the business really required such changes but it's more a philosophical change? Or preparing for leaner times ahead?
Ah crap so I’m going to be booted from gsuite in a year because I upgraded but won’t renew in a year while others will be fine? I barely use it too. Didn’t want to deal with moving the domain email yet.
They eventually gave just a "tell us you're doing personal use and we'll move you to a new free plan" option. That's what I ended up doing: I figured at least I'd wait until the end of their period to do anything.
I don't remember if they offered an option to go back if you'd already upgraded, though.
But yeah, this is the basic kind of weird and unfortunate scenario their muddled messaging led to.
I don't remember if they offered an option to go back if you'd already upgraded, though.
But yeah, this is the basic kind of weird and unfortunate scenario their muddled messaging led to.
I’m sure I won’t be able to go back. This sucks. Are you sure the free plan includes email? I’ll check again
Edit: seems like the free plan doesn’t include email? That sucks still but yea nothing else I could do then. I need the super low volume email
Edit: seems like the free plan doesn’t include email? That sucks still but yea nothing else I could do then. I need the super low volume email
It definitely includes email.
It seems like maybe you can go back even if you affirmatively upgraded? Haven't tried obviously but the Google page about it seems to indicate as much.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
It seems like maybe you can go back even if you affirmatively upgraded? Haven't tried obviously but the Google page about it seems to indicate as much.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
"Google does not care about their users". Well.. I am not sure about that
Google cares about its customers, not its users. Google users and Google customers are two different entities.
but there is always the option of not using Google products, or using as few as possible Google products.
A New York Times columnist tried this maybe a year or two ago. With the help of an expert, tried to go completely Google-free, meaning no access to any Google API. It turned out to be impossible, since so many apps, programs, and services rely on Google behind the scenes for everything from flight data to CAPTCHA.
Google cares about its customers, not its users. Google users and Google customers are two different entities.
but there is always the option of not using Google products, or using as few as possible Google products.
A New York Times columnist tried this maybe a year or two ago. With the help of an expert, tried to go completely Google-free, meaning no access to any Google API. It turned out to be impossible, since so many apps, programs, and services rely on Google behind the scenes for everything from flight data to CAPTCHA.
> Google users and Google customers are two different entities.
Google hardly cares about their customers as well, unless you are big enough to make a dent in their income, which you are not. The number of people paying for gsuite who never managed to get a hold of an actual human after a brutal and unwarranted termination of their online life is quite big, if you expect them to care about their customers.
Google hardly cares about their customers as well, unless you are big enough to make a dent in their income, which you are not. The number of people paying for gsuite who never managed to get a hold of an actual human after a brutal and unwarranted termination of their online life is quite big, if you expect them to care about their customers.
I pay Google for phones, home devices, a YouTube subscription, extra cloud storage... if you are made uncomfortable by the deal of getting an amazing suite of products without paying for any of it then perhaps you can quell your unease by becoming a paying customer.
Even if you are too frugal to part with any of your cash, your statement, besides being worn and trite, is plainly false. Without users (even the free tier), Google goes out of business, which is decidedly an anti goal.
Even if you are too frugal to part with any of your cash, your statement, besides being worn and trite, is plainly false. Without users (even the free tier), Google goes out of business, which is decidedly an anti goal.
You are gleefully ignoring the nearly weekly posts here about people getting locked out of all their Google services for terms of service violations that make no sense. Google has no support mechanisms.
My personal experience with an anti-spam service that got bought by Google and was cancelled was awful, as the "replacement" service was missing features that the one I was paying for originally had. More recently I tried for months to report a widespread Google Maps software issue to no avail where Streetview data was inaccessible. I had to resort to getting someone that works at Google to report the issue internally after which is was fixed within a few weeks.
It really is true that Google treats their users like garbage. The pretty much follows when users are merely an expense to be minimized in the quest to sell more ads.
My personal experience with an anti-spam service that got bought by Google and was cancelled was awful, as the "replacement" service was missing features that the one I was paying for originally had. More recently I tried for months to report a widespread Google Maps software issue to no avail where Streetview data was inaccessible. I had to resort to getting someone that works at Google to report the issue internally after which is was fixed within a few weeks.
It really is true that Google treats their users like garbage. The pretty much follows when users are merely an expense to be minimized in the quest to sell more ads.
[deleted]
Out of interest what did you replace G Suite with? All the paid options I've looked at cost more and/or have shockingly poor spam protection.
I've been using Office 365 Business Standard. Works quite well, works with all my devices (Windows natively, web with a very good web interface and iOS with the Outlook app and with Exchange syncing). Works nicely with a standard Microsoft account and can switch between them depending on what I need (e.g. Xbox/Rewards on personal account). Had to migrate stuff manually (using Google Takeout) to a 'normal' Google account which was pain - especially as they let you go from personal to Gsuite in one click - but once it's done it's done - thankfully Office 365 keeps the subscription & standard Microsoft account separate. Lost a YouTube account in the transfer but had to suck it up.
Can get a subscription for around £90 a year, usually with cashback through various retailers via the likes of Topcashback/Quidco (renewed last time with the BT online store and got cashback through TCB).
Spam filtering is second to none, nothing seems to get through it and doesn't have many false-positives either.
Can get a subscription for around £90 a year, usually with cashback through various retailers via the likes of Topcashback/Quidco (renewed last time with the BT online store and got cashback through TCB).
Spam filtering is second to none, nothing seems to get through it and doesn't have many false-positives either.
I've replaced it with purelymail.com (not affiliated) - and I'm happy with that. Been with the service for about 4 months now. Yes, there is occasional spam, but fine with that.
They offer calendar as well, works fine but I am not using it. Running my own self-hosted instance of NextCloud and using that for cal and contacts.
I do not use any online/web office suite.
They offer calendar as well, works fine but I am not using it. Running my own self-hosted instance of NextCloud and using that for cal and contacts.
I do not use any online/web office suite.
Why does google do things like this
I'm sure they did a careful, sophisticated A/B test and discovered that the timer was measurably decreasing revenue. After all, if you're clicking a timer widget, that means you're not clicking a Youtube video titled "6 minute countdown" and watching a 30-second ad first.
Sweet Jesus, that is even more cynical than my own take, but you must be right..! Amazingly, this could very well be the reason imo...
All of the SEO farm timer websites in the SRP will be plastered with Google ads too.
I lol'd pretty hard at this comment.
Then I went on to actually google "6 minute countdown" to check the view counters of the youtube videos (which are right at the top of the search results).
My jaw dropped.
2,505,001 views
95,726 views
66,394 views
44,479 views
Then I went on to actually google "6 minute countdown" to check the view counters of the youtube videos (which are right at the top of the search results).
My jaw dropped.
2,505,001 views
95,726 views
66,394 views
44,479 views
Yup. I didn't say that just to get in a dig at Google; I said it because after glancing at the search results, and having worked at a similarly "data-driven" company for a long time, it seems like the most likely and obvious explanation.
This is the most beautifully dystopian nonchalant black mirror reality...
And nobody is chiming in that Google being the best place to get instant answers without watching a 30-second ad is a very important part of their strategy that they should be careful about squandering to squeeze out a bit more ad revenue? At least make a dozen of these embedded tools a free perk for Google One subscribers if you need to make it all about money.
Alternatively they want to drive people towards their timer app to harvest more data.
BRB, going to make a youtube short for every math operation to replace calc.
But okay, for whatever reason they did it. Why is the dice roller still there?
It is already questionable why a search engine needs these features, but why remove one and not the other?
It is already questionable why a search engine needs these features, but why remove one and not the other?
I'm sure they did a careful, sophisticated A/B test and discovered that the dice roller was measurably decreasing revenue. After all, if you're clicking a widget, that means you're not clicking a Youtube video titled "roll dice" and watching a 30-second ad first.
(With apologies to teraflop)
(With apologies to teraflop)
Video description:
“Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random.”
“Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random.”
Hahaha glorious, the dice roller is still there! That MUST mean that Teraflop is right: removing the timer drives people to "x minute timer" youtube video's
I can only come up with "they truly truly TRULY don't give a single flying fuck about their users"
They love their users, but only those who watch or click on ads.
Imagine thinking you're their user. Google's users are advertisers. You are merely the product being sold.
you are the product, not the user. The real user is buying add space.
some Product Manager at Google will now get promoted for "removing legacy infrastructure, cutting costs and increasing ad revenue by directing traffic for popular search queries to partner sites"
Tbh I wouldn't be mad if Google went back to being only a search engine, an email client, and a web browser.
I quite like it that some simple unit conversions (Celsius <-> Farenheit is the one I use most often), rough currency conversions and the likes are displayed right on the search results page.
Just be careful with unit conversions and cooking/baking measurements. They are often wildly wrong. Search for "1 cup flour in grams" and you'll find suggested answers ranging from 100g to 300g -- while it _does_ vary by brand and type of flour, it certainly doesn't vary that much!
I've seen variations in published cookbooks too! Maybe not this much, but easily in the 150-250 range. It's a real problem, not just a Google one.
FWIW, some of these can be done in your OS search bar. Cmd Space on the Mac, and Win key on the pc. Not sure about the various flavors of Linux though.
GNOME supports unit conversion too, by pressing Super and typing in the queries. And iOS too. Not sure about Android though, because IIRC the search bar just directs you to Google search.
Consider using the "units" program. It's excellent and can handle almost any conversion and unit-full math expression.
Can also do them on iOS by swiping down the home screen
KDE will do it in Krunner. All units and currency
Krunner is super finicky about it though, especially since it won't handle even the simplest of mixed units (eg. neither 6ft 2in or 6'2" works, where 6ft, 6', 2", and 2in all give conversions on their own).
...and then after it fails, if you hit enter or click at the top of the results like you would to copy the value, it launches whatever random program burbled to the top when it gave up.
...and then after it fails, if you hit enter or click at the top of the results like you would to copy the value, it launches whatever random program burbled to the top when it gave up.
This is at least amazing for a few lucky website owners and YouTubers.
Maybe someone in the EU anti-trust area discovered Google had a timer and threatened to fine them?
Maybe someone in the EU anti-trust area discovered Google had a timer and threatened to fine them?
I don't get it, why do people use the "google timer" or any kind of online stopwatch, like, any modern desktop environment comes with a timer application, and it even works offline!!! I get using currency conversion (since that's data that changes) and a few other functions. But really, seriously, can someone explain to me what was the use-case for this?
Consistency. It's in the same place and works the same way on every platform.
That makes sense, thank you. This reminds that most people don't really want "native" experiences on their devices, and mostly think about "consistency". I guess that's the same use case for using a shell to do basic chores.
Linux Mint (Cinnamon) does not come with a timer or stopwatch pre-installed. I didn't realize this until I needed a stopwatch a few weeks ago only to find nothing.
There are tray applets available for this, but none that combine both a timer and stopwatch, so you have to deal with two extra icons in your tray or just use Google.
There are tray applets available for this, but none that combine both a timer and stopwatch, so you have to deal with two extra icons in your tray or just use Google.
KDE has one, but it's a confusing interface for non-power users, since you need to tell it what to do at the end. If it just defaulted to an alert, it would be perfect.
That's interesting considering GNOME (which Cinnamon is a fork of) has one by default, curious why they would remove such thing (or was it not there to begin with when they forked?)
I open my Windows 10 start menu, type in 'timer', and no results are found. Same for 'stopwatch'.
The google timer just worked.
The google timer just worked.
Both 'timer' and 'stopwatch' suggest the Clock app to me in Windows 10. When I open it there is timer and stopwatch functionality available in the menus.
For me, when setting up a call with a large amount of people on a webex/zoom meeting - will throw a timer up on the browser and screen share. Folks know when we will start the meeting again. I'm sure there are ways to do it with PPT... but a web page timer is good enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429564
Edit: Another blog post from someone that noticed it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-timer.html