Google Timer is gone
google.com
google.com
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
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?
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.
Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts
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.
> This repository is in the process of being migrated.
...oh
If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
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.
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.
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.
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)…
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
It will. You will see some day.
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.
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.
One I like better, no ads, no stopwatch function though: https://e.ggtimer.com/
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.
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.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
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.
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
> 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...
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.
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.
I can’t. They killed that feature.
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...
Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.
To be fair though, the entries on killedbygoogle seem to average ~5 years before death. By that metric 9 years is a respectable run.
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...
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:
Search is very a complex system and quite possibly there is a poor SRE looking into this right now.
Sounds like the results were either 34 or 69, then...
It’s Rule 34 (if it exists, there is porn with it).
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...
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.
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
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
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.
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.
* 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.
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
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.
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).
It also would explain why the DDG one remains, as they don't meet the definition of a gatekeeper.
To what end? Needlessly pissing off lawmakers isn’t a smart strategy.
Does Google really not have some sort of "Always rank this result first" flag?
huh so I suppose it’s possible there are ghost features no one maintains but might still work?
That said we could argue for days about what a feature is.
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.
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.
Those people who don't get promoted are fired?
“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 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.
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.
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.
I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.
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.
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'.
It's a bug that'll be fixed when someone notices.
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.
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.
Not that I'm bitter, or anything.
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.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer+&t=newext&atb=v265-1&ia=answ...
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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
I mean, Google rolls over in bed and crushes $1mm products and does not even realize it.
It performs its job perfectly.
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
Recently I've started using Kagi (I love it) and I am slightly dissapointed that it does not have any.
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.
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.
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.
This right here is just one more reason why I will never trust google.
If it's not ads it's not pertinent.
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
My guess is it'll be back up by Monday.
- 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It is already questionable why a search engine needs these features, but why remove one and not the other?
(With apologies to teraflop)
“Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random.”
...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.
Maybe someone in the EU anti-trust area discovered Google had a timer and threatened to fine them?
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.
The google timer just worked.