I don’t understand the downvotes. Google has a long history of killing projects. Of all the public DNS to trust, why does anyone have confidence in Google? Because they’re big?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 1500 times...
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 1500 times...
Track record: 8888 has been running for more than ten years.
Popularity: It appears to be incredibly widely used; e.g. a research paper from 2013 claimed it was serving 7% of all end user DNS queries, and Wikipedia claims that in 2018 it answered a trillion DNS requests per day (i.e. 10M qps).
Business value: It is true that there is no direct revenue here. But I'm pretty sure that the original reason for launching it was defensive. A lot of Google's networking projects have clearly been driven by trying to ensure that users can connect straight and reliable to Google's services with no interference from middleboxes, since every request lost to interference is also lost ad revenue.
Crappy ISP DNS servers that serve spam pages instead of NXDOMAIN are a pretty big vector here.
I understand the point you're trying to make here - but long-lived products are still shut down by Google, fairly often. Here's a list of some Google products that have been / were around for 10 years or more before being killed (or are slated to be killed soon):
- Chrome Apps
- Cloud Print
- Fusion Tables
- Youtube Video Annotations
- Google Search Appliance (17 years old!!)
- Google Showtimes
- Google Code
- Picasa
- Orkut
- Postini
That's not even close to the full list of things that were more than 10 years old when Google shut them down. I left a bunch off for brevity's sake - but browsing https://killedbygoogle.com is a really eye-opening experience. They really have shut down a lot of stuff - and if you loosen the requirement to ">= 7 years" the list gets very, very long.
Again - I understand what you're trying to say. But it's just not simply a "zero effort joke". Google has killed a lot of things, and a lot of the things they killed were well used, long lived, and popular.
They'll keep Google DNS running as long as it provides business value to them, and that's it.
(Edit: I'm bad at list formatting, sorry)
The point was that it's a multi-dimensional space, and the OP should actually consider the product rather than automatically go all "lol, Google product, bet it gets killed".
So if you think that "some old products were discontinued" is any kind of rebuttal, I clearly didn't make my point well enough. Of course that happens! The alternative is that any sufficiently old product would automatically become immortal, which would be a ludicrous idea.
8.8.8.8 clearly has a ton of users, which already differentiates it from basically everything on your list. It's also isn't something you could just put in a maintenance mode and forget about, unlike a lot of the things on your list, both due to the scale and due to the impact if it were to stop working. Something like "Google Showtimes" would not have been a big drain on resources for most of its lifespan... When there's a measurable cost to keeping a service running, the longevity does actually signal something about the business value.
Products with no users get killed by all companies. Products with hundreds of millions of users don't get killed with one exception: to migrate the users to a different product for the same task.
And that can't really happen with DNS! They can't replace the clients, nor force the clients to upgrade, and they can't change the protocol in a way that would force some kind of a migration. Even if they end up deciding that the service needs a full rewrite, the external interface will have to stay the same.
And once you think about the specifics, it actually becomes kind of an interesting discussion to have! What are the circumstances that could lead to this service being discontinued?
A complete migration from IPv4 to IPv6 might do it: part of the value of both this and 1.1.1.1 is that these are IP addresses that people can actually remember. Their IPv6 addresses do not have that property. Not holding my breath on that one though :-P And even if that migration ever finishes, it's plausible that operating systems start including a dropdown of well-known public DNS servers as one of the configuration options.
Could they replace DNS entirely? Come up with a "QuikDNS" that starts off as proprietary, is implemented in only Chrome and Android but never replaces DNS outside of their ecosystem? Or instead of a proprietary protocol just stop supporting classic DNS and only continue supporting DNS over HTTP? I don't see the former, there's just not enough wrong with the standard protocols for that to be worth it. I could definitely imagine the latter happening at very long timescales (like, not for at least 10 years). At the point where 99% of the traffic is DNS over HTTP, maybe the cost benefit ratio stops being there for classic DNS.
> and a lot of the things they killed were well used, long lived, and popular.
I don't think the examples you posted really match that description. Most of them weren't ever popular, let alone when they were discontinued. Maybe Picasa was?
> They'll keep Google DNS running as long as it provides business value to them, and that's it.
As in yes: I know it provides business value to them.
> Use your brain
Please be civil in your comments and refrain from insults. That’s not a charitable way to interact with others.
You calling it a tired joke doesn’t change these things.
but gog not using the harvested data seems somewhat unbelivable
DNS is the latter. Google’s RSS reader was the former.
Very tragic, but things change. The nerd rage over Google Reader, etc is similar.
It’s pretty simple really. Google acts like a VC — place lots of bets on new projects in the hope that they’ll blow up and either a) start making adwords-scale profits or b) markedly increase adwords profits. Projects that don’t do either of those things are killed. The question is: Does 8.8.8.8 markedly increase adwords profit?
Per this site that tracks dead google projects, thus far they are at 220.