Google SMS search has been shut down

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/yKG7BGro7QQ/ntAXQWWKj70J

by duked • 13 years ago

75 55 13 years ago

productforums.google.com

jstanley• 13 years ago

Are Google having cashflow problems?

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

dmight• 13 years ago

My guess is Google is focusing more on a certain goal than having cash flow issues.

duked• 13 years ago

To me it sounds more like they are shutting down services that can't be monetized :/

ixtraz• 13 years ago

Looks like it's a big chance to make a startup based on big-company closed service. E.g. Feedly is a good option.

Kylekramer5• 13 years ago

Or services that have no future? SMS search is a dead man walking in 2013.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Google "Babel" is coming. Maybe that's why.

I also think Google's top executives have a certain vision about what apps they will need in the future, and where they are heading, and that doesn't include many of the more "random" projects that were built before.

rm9992• 13 years ago

>Are Google having cashflow problems?

Nope, they are more profitable than ever.

My friend who works at Google explained to me that a big issue is maintenance. It's a tougher problem than it sounds because if an issue comes up someone needs to understand the codebase well. When a product is no longer worth the budget of full-time employees the best course of action is to kill the product.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

This: Nope, they are more profitable than ever.

Goes hand in hand with "shutting down a lot of services" since rounded to the nearest billion dollars the only business Google has is search & display advertising, generally deleting anything else accretes positively to the bottom line :-)

ams6110• 13 years ago

Makes sense. It's like the people who can't throw anything away because they "might need it" some day. Eventually they are drowning in clutter and just keeping it all organized would consume more time than they have.

keeperofdakeys• 13 years ago

This seems to be a common theme after Larry Page took over as CEO. Instead of having lots of small, separate things, everything seems to be moving towards having less, but larger services. Probably one of the better examples is google+, along with google now. It will be interesting to see what Larry's end vision is.

lobotryas• 13 years ago

Wow, from that thread the service looks very useful(even if you have a smartphone with data). Wish I knew about it before the shutdown.

I guess such is life in the Googleverse now: if you're unprofitable then you're "distracting us from our core mission". Who wants to make bets on the next service(s) to bite the dust? :)

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Never knew about it, either.

Centigonal• 13 years ago

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

jerf• 13 years ago

I looked in the original data set [1] to see if this was in there; unless "SMS" meant "SMS search", it may not be at all. If it isn't in there it would be interesting to put it in the model as it stands now and see what the model thinks of the probability of shutdown.

[1] http://www.gwern.net/docs/2013-google.csv

notatoad2• 13 years ago

i can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not - are you honestly complaining that a service you didn't learn about until its shutdown is shutting down? especially a service based on a technology that is clearly not long for this world?

of course things get shut down when they're unprofitable or not aligned with the business strategy. that is the most basic principle of running a business. google isn't running a charity to provide you with obscure and marginally useful services.

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

Shameless plug: https://sendhub.com - a free business phone for calling and group texting‎

sbuccini• 13 years ago

It seems to me that this service would be really, really handy in countries where Nokia bar phones are prevalent. I'd love to see how many people actually used this service in those areas, because it depriving those people of this service goes against Google's mission of providing the entire world with information.

tobyjsullivan• 13 years ago

I was always a huge evangelist for this service and it was incredibly useful to so many people I know. I'm both surprised and disappointed to see it go but I guess you can't serve ads via SMS (well, you can, but...).

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

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

hmsimha6• 13 years ago

I posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/

Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google responds "SMS search has been shutdown. You can continue to search the web at google.com on any device". This isn't exactly helpful for someone lost in an unfamiliar city without a smartphone or GPS.

jfb• 13 years ago

Google says their mission is one thing; their actions seem to point to another. Actions speak louder than words.

Kylekramer5• 13 years ago

Sure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.

blackjack48• 13 years ago

I wouldn't exactly refer to them as a "dying breed" quite yet. I recall seeing a statistic somewhere that in many developing countries, SMS adoption rates are still going up. There's still a prominent market for SMS search, just not necessarily the one that Google wants to serve.

hmsimha6• 13 years ago

I'd like to know what you're basing this on. In the U.S. this may very well be true, though the fact still remains that lower-income people are less likely to have smartphones. But what about in developing nations?

skybrian• 13 years ago

Android works perfectly well without a data plan. I have none because I'm usually on WiFi and when I'm not, any McDonalds or Starbucks will work. I've occasionally thought of getting one, but last time I shopped for it, I couldn't find one at a reasonable price given low usage.

But then, I've never used search by SMS. Finding WiFi makes more sense.

hmsimha6• 13 years ago

I just wanted to add that, to me, this is a more egregious shutdown than reader. While many on Hacker News (who I'm assuming are more likely to have a smartphone than the average working-class citizen) may not understand this, envision this:

You are in an unfamiliar city, attempting to follow directions someone gave you that you scribbled down. You take a wrong turn and wind up in a rough-looking neighborhood at 2 AM. Most of your friends are asleep. What do you do?

This has happened to me, and I counted myself lucky to be able to text google for directions. While this may not be an extremely common scenario, there is the possibiilty that access to google's sms search may have saved someone's life.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

If this service consumes resources, it kills people in some way or another too. Potential, largely unquantified, outliers aren't a good thing on which to base strategy.

film42• 13 years ago

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

gkop• 13 years ago

People with feature phones are still going to need to find info, and this move shifts the traffic onto services with less resources than Google (eg. https://twitter.com/Telefact). As additional services shut down due to increasing traffic, that traffic will move to the surviving services, until they all shut down.

Kiro• 13 years ago

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

hmsimha6• 13 years ago

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

samfisher83• 13 years ago

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

espo• 13 years ago

If there really is a market for this, it shouldn't be too hard to recreate with the help of twilio and google APIs. The problem is getting paid, maybe you could charge a monthly fee or the users could agree to receive 1 ad for every X searches?

aioprisan• 13 years ago

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

brudgers• 13 years ago

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

myko• 13 years ago

> killing off a valuable service,

Which valuable service is being killed off here? I'd never heard of this before. Doesn't look like it is used very much.

onster• 13 years ago

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

sgromoll• 13 years ago

Hello all,

I'm CEO of DOTGO, which provides access to the internet using SMS.

Good news: you can still access google's search service using the short code DOTCOM (368266). Just text "google" + your search term to DOTCOM (368266).

You can actually access a bunch of websites by texting the website's domain name to DOTCOM (368266). For example, try "cnn" or "nytimes" or "yahoo" or "gmail".

And if you have your own website, you can use DOTGO to make your own website SMS-accessible for free. Visit our website dotgo.com to find out how or check out this doc:

http://dotgo.com/Support/Documentation/doc0001.1.0/

I can't guarantee how long we'll able to provide access, but we will as long as we're technically able!

Stefan Gromoll [first initial dot lastname] @ dotgo.com Co-Founder & CEO DOTGO 200 Varick St. #805 New York, NY 10014

Text "dotgo" to DOTCOM (368266) to find out more

jonmarkgo• 13 years ago

As per some of the suggestions here, just published a tutorial on building your own Google SMS search with Twilio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5700331

Google SMS search has been shut down

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