You can now integrate Google Search on your website | Hacker News Reader

You can now integrate Google Search on your website

cloud.google.com

45 pointshubraumhugo44 comments

It's difficult to get excited about any Google Cloud product launch, because Google almost seems committed to being difficult for businesses to trust. Just today on HN there were multiple stories about Google banning entire companies for arbitrary reasons, possibly as a result of poorly-conceived automated decision-making. And Google Cloud is gaining a reputation for massive price hikes - sometimes doubling rates or introducing charges for services that were previously included.

Some of their services are pretty slick, and it's tempting to build off them, but I don't recommend relying on Google without a backup strategy in case they suddenly pull the rug out from under you.

This.

Lost access to my business on Google infra / services after leaving a positive review on a bakery while on holiday to Paris - for "violating Google Maps policy".

That should teach tech stuff never to leave reviews and comments, too much risk involved.

This reminds me of how people self censure their real opinions in authoritarian regimes. It creates a climate against creativity and innovation, bringing the system down in the long term.

Under what circumstances would you be violating Google Maps policy while travelling and how does it lead you to lose your enture business on Google services. Something doesn't smell right

There is a well documented story of someone loosing his whole firms Google account because a decade before he was privately associated with a developer who years later decided to write scam software. This does not shock me, at all.

But it's really your own fault for not having high reaching contacts into Google's upper tier!

... high-level contacts into Google's upper tier sometimes can't even help.

google's policy is to ban everything associated with an account immediately upon violation of obscure policy in one specific product.

i do not know what policy specifically could lead to a ban due to a use of map reviews while traveling internationally but at this point this is what many of us have come to expect from google as a matter of course.

algorithm: OMG, this user has searched for 3 different towns in the same session each of which is the site of a nuclear plant! Potential terrorist match!

Yeah, the general consensus I get from reading HN* is that the winds are blowing away from Google services and associated vendor lock-in / account banishment risk, rather than towards.

Given some recent discussions, I found this excerpt amusing:

"... supercharge their websites and mobile apps with Google-quality search. Built on Google’s technologies that understand user intent and context, the solution helps businesses improve the search and overall shopping experience across all of their digital touchpoints."

*My choice of posts to read may be (strongly) biased towards those moving away from Google.

The take away should really be that posts that get voted to the top of HN do not represent the general public, or even the majority of the tech world. Google Cloud makes $20 billion a year in revenue, about a third of AWS. Google overall makes $260 billion. Its revenues are rising by 50%+ annually.

People aren't quitting in droves, and the company isn't on the edge of failure, as regular readers might believe.

Google is doing fine, and probably will for years. HN is just saying that the safe option is not to build a business (or a lifestyle) on the shaky foundations that they provide.

Google's business is Google's success, not your success.

I’m not convinced anyone is saying people are leaving in droves… but for infrastructure where trust is key, when it comes to new customers, especially smaller ones? I think some are keeping it in mind.

I don't think that's a good conclusion. Most of Google's business is search and ad sense. HN consensus is that Google is doing fine. The HN consensus -- which I think is correct -- is not to rely on Google for any critical functionality which might put your business (or personal life) at risk.

- Adsense as an advertising option makes complete sense. Adsense as your sole source of customer growth is asking for trouble.

- Stay the !@#$% away from Google Workspace, if you're counting on business continuity. It's fine for low-stakes use (e.g. students in a school, where there is no long-term continuity).

- GCE is fine as an option if you have a generic dev-ops infrastructure where you just need cloud servers, and where you can move to AWS or Azure in a blink. Relying on Google Cloud proprietary services is asking for trouble.

- Android App Store is fine for a quick buck, or as a supplement to a core business. Think long and hard before building a business around it, though.

... and so on.

I question what is going wrong with Google at a management level. It's products have been undergoing a slow creeping rot since Brin and Page bailed from the company.

Google Search as a product is declining in usefulness due to a very silly decision to no longer support lexical queries(!) They've built a broken AI fad that delivers nothing but song lyrics and shopping results to long tail queries. The core product is rotting and no one is empowered to fix it.

Google Maps is now suffering from the same treatment

Really sad, I used to love Google maps. It feels like it's becoming worse by the year (at least in Europe). It used to be extremely accurate in predicting traffic and knowing about road closures. Now I can often estimate traffic better from memory and have to look up other sources to know about road closures or construction. Business info is pretty good still, but also only because it's provided by businesses.

I cannot understand how they actively got so much worse over a few years. Especially since they don't suffer the Spam/SEO issues they have in Search.

> Just today on HN there were multiple stories about Google banning entire companies for arbitrary reasons, possibly as a result of poorly-conceived automated decision-making.

There might also be some selection bias here since "escalating Google issues to HN" has become a thing. Complaining about Google is popular on HN, for good or bad. Yet, they grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves. It's quite possible customers of other companies just don't escalate to HN (yet).

(Said as a former Google employee.)

To be fair Google losing users is not the same as Google losing customers. Their main customers are the companies paying Google to stalk you across the net, and they don't need you to have a Google account to do that.

Yet, they grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves.

They grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves, yet.

It's not just on HN. Also, since HN is not used by the general public, isn't it possible that the number of people facing these issues might be higher?

Google is a psychopath business partner. It is important to understand this if you are to benefit from a relationship with them. They seem perfectly normal and useful, and then one day will "snap" and destroy your business, banning you for no seeming reason.

This seems a useful service. Yes, use it for your business benefit, but just understand that the psychopath may turn any time, and plan your business contingencies accordingly.

Google Custom Search (now called Programmable Search Engine) has been a thing since 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Programmable_Search_Eng...). You could always put a Google-powered search box on your website.

This announcement is for a new cloud service for retailers.

Youtube could use their programmable search engine to search inside playlists and comments. Too bad the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.

Google Custom Search is finds webpages for the person searching.

This new service searches products via an API for the web server.

Yes, re-read what I wrote

Nowadays I am immediately thinking:

1. Google Search is not very good anymore.

2. This is more user tracking to Google

3. This is going to be way more expensive than it needs to be

4. This going to be discontinued in a couple of years.

I used to maintain a website that gives simple definitions for terms, before Wikipedia was well-known. It had integrated Google Search, specific to the site. I just checked now (the site is still up, though unmaintained for a decade and a half) and the Google Search feature in fact does not work anymore. I have no idea for how long that has been the case. I'm apprehensive about clicking the links to AskJeeves and Fark still on the sidebar!

> 64% of U.S. retail website managers have no clear plan for improvement.

I have a feeling that a number approaching 64% of U.S. retail website managers may disagree with this.

They may however have a plan that: Doesn't align with Google; doesn't align with Google's understanding of what they need; isn't understood with Google; or even Google didn't ask that.

Some may indeed not have a plan. Some may not have a plan for very good reason. But I doubt it's 64%. What it is is a cheaply aggressive play for the ears of 'leadership' of organisations with dysfunctional communication or trust.

Didn't Google once prioritize design? I remember when people would talk about the Google Logo of the day.

The fine article starts with an MS Paint rendering of a woman, whose entire body from the waist up is smaller than the distance from her foot to her knee. The arm hangs down almost to the knee, like an ape. With the small head and long arms it looks like the artist is trying to emphasize how unintelligent the character is, is that possible? Is this an attempt to appeal to people who themselves feel unintelligent, that they might think "if she can do it, I can do it"? Am I reading too much into this, or did Google simply lower their design standards?

It's called Corporate Memphis and it's a fad that graphic designers at seemingly all tech companies have fallen for despite the fact that it's ugly and people hate it.

That's a stock art image. It's one of those free artworks available online that you can put on your website and has caught on for some reason. No one at Google made it, they just put it on their corporate blogs and websites like many others.

So they no longer use an in-house design team for official communications? That is concerning.

You damn well know what that style is. ;) But nice wording, haha.

This style is not only trying to induce the feelings of "unintelligent", it's even the childlike - no, babylike - feeling that they are after, I guess.

Just implement your own semantic search or work with one of many vendors! HuggingFace OOTB pretrained models + Vector Databases provide a much cleaner user-experience than Google that your team can control.

Do you know of any toy examples using HF models + oss vector dbs? I’m interested in learning

Didn't this used to be a free service you could add to your blog?

I don't do a lot of online shopping, but one place has a built-in Google search with the "site:xyz.com" search parameter pre-specified. Seemed to work pretty well, 5+ years ago.

My recent disappointments with shopping search is along the lines of "Radeon" -> "out of stock". ie. unrelated to search technology inadequacies.

a long time ago an organisation I worked for purchased a google search appliance (and actual bit of rack hardware) and I was tasked with setting it up. the inherit limits in this bit of junk made it almost useless, I expended a lot of effort trying to get it to work as it should. Part of it was that it was purchased without considering these limitations vs the orgs use case.

More Google spin.

> "Some 94% of U.S. consumers abandoned a shopping session because they received irrelevant search results"

This would often be because the product is simply not in stock, leaving no other option for the user other than leaving the site.

> "It’s a phenomenon known as “search abandonment""

A phenomenon? If you say so, Google. Please tell me more about how adding Google search to my client's website will magically materialize the out of stock item.

Google makes these claims for self-serving reasons. They're behind the survey that supports the claim, which in turn supports their agenda to have websites install their cloud search product.

> "shoppers still struggle to find what they’re looking for. They often have to come up with a perfectly-worded query that a retailer’s site search engine will understand"

Oh bullshit, Google.

Even the most basic site search will return product results from words contained in the product name. People looking for bread knives on a homewares site can use "bread" or "knife" in their search and get relevant results. And it's trivial for site search to pick up other meta data from the product, such as descriptions. "Baking" for example, the user could find the bread knives by searching for baking accessories.

That last point - '> "shoppers still struggle to find..."' - is only ~75% Google bullshit. I semi-regularly use search engines (usually not Google) to find products on e-commerce sites with wretched built-in search. Or where the built-in search only works if I allow javascript from a dozen or more creep-looking domains to execute.

I'd be interested to see even one example where the e-commerce store's own site search failed to return a relevant result that google otherwise achieves. Just one example.

I use Google search too when shopping online. For the purpose of returning a range of websites so I can browse for best price etc. But the topic here is whether Google could do better when confined to one site, and it would also need to return actual products not just "SEO" landing pages talking about those products.

I don’t know why you’re being so vitriolic, but at least in my experience - e-commerce search absolutely sucks. Even Amazon is really bad for half my queries.

Because they're claiming that only 6% of shoppers are successful with searching for products on e-commerce sites. They imply Google can help prevent the 94% who "abandon their session" because of inadequate site search. It's a garbage claim even when accounting for poor quality or broken site search.

> e-commerce search absolutely sucks

Any examples? To qualify as an example, the site search would need to fail to return a product for a given phrase that Google search otherwise finds.

Hasn't this been a feature for a while?

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