This isn’t entirely evil. They give you a full HTML dump to host elsewhere, or if you like what they did with the migration, you can just click a button to sign off and they publish it.
Just have to hope people notice before their sites go offline.
Just have to hope people notice before their sites go offline.
The cost would be a rounding error for them.
Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Project? I hope so. That would absolve them to some degree.
I know a company shouldn't be responsible for storing people's content indefinitely but I hate the fact that human culture has become so transient.
In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on.
In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost.
I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.
A few things to consider:
- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.
- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution.
- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.
That ship has sailed. Google's reputation for instability can't get any worse. At this point, it would take a complete 180° and a good 5-10 years of angelic behavior from Google for me to even consider relying on them in any capacity.
i stll giggle at my ignorance thinking they wouldnt do youtube and search.
i really mis search, it was such a nice product. Now it is so bad that internet natives who could slap together a website in 20 min dont understand when i ask them why they have no website of their own. "you mean like a resume?"
they are right of course. no one would ever find it.
Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard.
There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring?
Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements?
You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.
This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work.
Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?
“””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
Fixed. I have no use for Google any more.
They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless.
If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.
If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."
In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.
It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
Turning off a web server on its own isn't removing web history
When Google targets sites that are least likely to have a backup anywhere else, least likely to have active admins, least likely for an admin to notice an email notification in an old inbox, I'm pretty sure that's deleting web history.
Huh, must have been about something else.
There's your problem
We’re going to lose a valuable source of old data if former admins don’t show up, do the work, and rehost
They only gave me a "converted site" in my gdrive when I downloaded from the migration manager.