Google Timer is back | Hacker News Reader

Google Timer is back

google.com

190 pointsmeken89 comments

How are people supposed to use features like this if they get dropped and re-added from time to time? If I want a convenient timer, googling "set 5 minute timer" has no advantage if I don't know whether it will work or not. Inconsistency is an enemy of convenience.

I agree with you in general but not in this particular case. Best case scenario: you get a five minute timer running right away. Worst case scenario: you click the first link and get a five minute timer right away

First link would be ad-filled, SEO gamed bullshit.

Yup, something undesirable that will probably still work while Google Timer is "down."

Basically the first page of any Google search page is ads now.

If I want a quick 5 minute timer, it’s just a “Hey Siri” away. Navigating to Google to type a query is strictly inferior.

Screw those people for trying to monetize something you’re expecting to use for free. Your phone and computer have the capability to do timers. Why are you googling a timer with this attitude in the first place?

> Your [...] computer has the capability to do timers

Source? At least on macOS, i'm not aware of any built in timer or stopwatch.

  sleep 300; tput bel

or even

  timer() { sleep $1 ; i=$2; until [ $i -eq 0 ]; do tput bel; sleep 1; i=$((i-1)); done }
  timer 300 10

https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/07/macos-ventura-clock-timers/

Your software never has bugs? We definitely had to turn something off before because something didn't line up/someone messed up planning during a bigger tech transition. This stuff happens in big orgs ran by humans, I'm happy that it's back and it's a lot better than the first result in any case.

I know that software is fiendishly difficult, but if you think a parent is ever going to put their child in a software driven car, then the industry had probably better get a bit more serious.

This doesn't make any sense. "Software" isn't produced by a single company with a single set of engineering practices and trade-offs. Safety-critical software has been around for decades and decades, and it's not developed and tested using the same practices as a minuscule D-list feature of a web service.

A lesson that Boeing apparently needed a refresher on.

It does make sense, you just disagree on whether it’s actionable or not.

I already put my kids in a software driven car every day. It has automatic cruise control, automatic lane keeping, and automatic emergency braking. I don't trust Tesla's Autopilot yet but as soon as there is a self-driving car which I believe is safer than a car driven by me, I will switch to that.

Why wouldn't I be surprised to see it gone later on? Kudos to Google for reshaping their brand image this way, they made my switch to alternatives much easier.

On the other hand I doubt many more people noticed that it went away than ppl on HN who saw the previous thread. So now they've all been re-informed and know they can rely on it again.

Still bitter about reader over here, friend.

this this this!

Is it inconsistent? Even if it isn't google's timer, you still get results for timers provided by other websites, if you google search for "set 5 minute timer".

Recent and related:

Google Timer is gone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295674 - July 2022 (323 comments)

Less recent but related:

Google Timer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436869 - Oct 2014 (34 comments)

Google timer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429564 - Sept 2013 (154 comments)

Now set timer on Google.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155243 - Aug 2013 (11 comments)

Here's a timer for when they'll shut it down again

https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+2+weeks

This show count down from 35h? Isn't a week longer than 35h?

It's odd. At first it shows is 336 hours, 0 mins, and 0 seconds and then it counts down to 35:59:59. Clearly a bug.

Crazy. I will stick with my phone's timer.

Huh that's weird. It actually shows the correct 336h for a few milliseconds first and then counts back from 35h. I wonder what's happening internally - messing up a timer shouldn't be that easy normally, right?

Looks like losing the hundreds digit of hours-- truncation.

Because windows search is useless and if I search "timer" it'll probably bring up "timer.py" from a random application or just search bing

Googling "mortgage rates" also stopped showing the interactive widget when the timer first disappeared. And now that widget is also back.

Find my phone widget is also gone. Need to click through into the website now which for a person who constantly misplaces their phone is annoying.

and .... it's buggy

try https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+724+years

click on start, looses most of the time

When would you ever need a timer for 724 years?

When you're waiting for the answer to life, the universe and everything

A bug is a bug. "Why would anyone ever do XYZ" is a separate discussion. And if you write software for a living you know that there is always that one user who will do exactly XYZ.

Hyrum's law. How meta.

Nope. Undefined behavior on obviously incorrect input isn't a bug in my world. ( might be in other circumstances )

You must be a C programmer.

Haha. I was thinking along similar lines as kuboble, but then I'm someone in the process of trying to learn C.

I agree, upon further thought, that at least an error message would be better for the user (e.g. "Maximum timer duration exceeded").

"Undefined behavior consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be compiler engineers whom the language standard protects but does not bind, alongside developers whom the language standard binds but does not protect." (source: https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/1558181259314167808 )

I mean, the query is “timer $period”. It’s correct in its syntax, a period’s a period. It’s not asking for “timer TIMMY; DROP TABLES”. That’s incorrect input.

It's not incorrect input. It's incorrect handling of accepted input.

Undefined behavior on obviously incorrect input is always a bug. Incorrect input should give you an error.

Sure, a bug is a bug, but the original remark was that the software was "buggy". I read "buggy" as riddled with pretty obvious bugs. If we're calling software "buggy" for having any bugs, then, I guess, nearly all software is "buggy" (and the word looses its usefulness).

Anything over 100 hours gets recalculated modulo 100, so 101 hours becomes 1 hour. But then the page title, which is meant to show the current countdown in the tab display, gets updated to show the full time, but weirdly formatted. So at least two bugs.

Try "timer 101 hours". The page title will (very quickly) show "10:05:9x" where x is the 10s digit of the seconds. While the page itself claims it's a one hour timer (59 minutes and some seconds). So the actual time is in there somewhere, just showing up wrong in both places.

It also doesn't seem to let me enter 30 minutes as a timer, but most other minutes times work. So, yes, it's buggy.

EDIT: It's not actually modulo 100 hours, I should note. The display is showing it that way, but since it has the real time stored internally it still counts down. If it were actually modulo 100 hours then it would zero out a 100 hour (or 200 or 300...) countdown immediately, instead these wrap to 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds on the first tick.

EDIT: For grins I'd started a 101 hour timer a bit over an hour ago before stepping away from the computer. Despite the display silliness, it actually will run for 101 hours. After the first hour the displayed time rolls back to 99:59:59 and the page title updates correctly. I also noticed that there's a progress bar below the timer, it correctly shows the progress within the 101 hour timer the whole time.

Those sound like reasonable bugs, the original that we were responding to (724 years), less so.

724 Test Engineers walk into a bar...

Maybe to be reminded that were about 7% of the way through the life of the 10,000 year clock?

https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html

Did they finish building it?

Some kind of overflow, it resets timer to 40 hours. Same thing happens with 1 year, except timer is reset to 60 hours. Another interesting observation is that "timer 723 years" did not bring timer up, but "timer 722 years" did.

Update: "timer 100 hours" works, but "timer 101 hours" does not. That is 100 hours is 144,000 seconds, does not seem to be anything special about this number.

Sometimes it drops to 40hr, other times to 100hr. Haven't been able to figure out what the pattern is.

725 years causes it to glitch twice

I got it to reset twice in row by using 725 years, reset to 63 then 99!

It can just only handle two digits in the hours place after the first tick. Any other digits get removed. 1 year becomes 60 hours because it turns 1 year into 8760 hours, then removes the "87" and leaves the "60"

Edit: this seems like it's just a display bug and the original time is still preserved. If you search "timer 100 year 1 second" then it formats to "876000h 00m 01s", then the next tick shows "0s", then the next tick shows "99h 59m 59s"

> Another interesting observation is that "timer 723 years" did not bring timer up

That is weird. Even weirder that "timer 723 year" (singular) does seem to work.

..and curiously, with the little speaker icon 'on', it produces no audio alarm for me, (firefox 103.0.2). Whereas this[1] one produces a quite notable sound.

[1] https://www.online-stopwatch.com/countdown-timer/

These days browsers make sure there's user interaction before audio plays. The other website you linked requires a click to start the timer, therefore meeting that requirement. If Google made this timer muted by default, and you had to click unmute, it would likely work.

Ran into a related bug on a site I was working on the other day and had to learn this browser quirk the hard way.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a "Chrome only" feature. In 2022 everything can happen.

Is it really buggy? Is it a feature that you need a timer of 724 years ... in a web browser?

OP took things a little far, you can make it glitch at the 5 day mark.

You may ask why I'd need a timer in my web browser for 5 days, and you be right to do so.

Haha. I'm not even for sure why I need a timer in the web browser at all.

However, I will concede it is indeed rather buggy. A Google search of "timer 3 minutes" does nothing for me, as it just performs a normal search with no timer widget. A search of "timer 2 minutes" or "timer 4 minutes" works fine.

I've noticed that the language parsing of these knowledge/assistant queries is a bit strange sometimes. A more subjective example is "10 lakh in USD". This isn't a perfectly formed query -- lakh is not a currency but a unit in the Indian numbering system. However, I think most humans would assume that I'm talking about converting Indian rupees and this is reflected in the organic search results. Google understands that I'm trying to convert currency but for some reason decides that I meant "10 lakh Euro in USD".

An obvious bug is an obvious bug, even if typical users don't often hit the bug.

I can absolutely think of a reasons why someone would use this. For example, a DM in a role playing game might pull up a very long timer as a prop to show their players.

I agree that "the number of times you want a 724 year timer to count to zero" is negligibly small, but that is a minor subset of "the number of times you want to show a 724 year timer counting towards zero"

And the title of the page shows something else and doesn't update.

#wontfix

Holding out for Reader ;)

It will only come back if the universe runs in a loop.

Looks like this was an actual bug, not deliberately removing a feature:

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1560010093294489602

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread//152736727

I don't see it on mobile (Firefox Android) but do if I hit request desktop site, in case anyone is confused

Google cripples the site on firefox android. There is an extension called Google search fixer that adjusts the user agent to mobile chrome on Google searches make it not do that.

Response to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295674

My kid used this all the time because I would give him timelimits on his Minecraft time. When it disappeared, he was in complete disarray but started to rely on Siri. I think he'll be happy to see it back up and running!

For timing a meeting, try http://timeit.lol/ — it shows you an estimate of when your meeting will end, which will creep forward if you exceed the time allotted for the current agenda item. It was designed for standups, where each person gets 5 minutes to speak, but you can also add agenda items of varying length.

You can also use it in count-up mode (http://timeit.lol/?0) to count how much time each person has spoken.

Another good way to time certain meetings is using dollars: https://www.mcgurrin.info/mcc/meetingclock.htm

I think it is back but it is still I tried for

- Timer 4 minutes

- Timer 5 minutes

and it does work. But if with a running timer, I try to put a new timer let's say Timer 6 minutes, then it shows a normal search page.

https://www.timer-tab.com/

When it stopped working for me I just started using duckduckgo's timer

Probably put it back so someone can put it on their promotion packet.

El low hanging fruit.

https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+1+century

Side note:

I still can't synchronize a timer across Google Homes in the same location.

For a purpose-built cloud frontend, it's not very cloudy.

Meh, just use Siri or Alexa - it's about all they're good for.

who even knew they had a timer...

Imagine being the person/team who worked on this knowing that most of the web will never see your work.

True, but someone at Google working on a public facing app, even if 99.99% of users never know it's there, will still have orders of magnitude more people using their software than most of us.

Enjoy it before it goes back to the graveyard!

Wow! So there is somewhere the killedbygoogle homepage. Do we also have a reincarnatedbygoogle site?

OP's link also shows how long until Google Timer is killed again

Anyone placing bets on how long it lasts? Standard 18-24 months?

You can set a timer to remind you.

:D haha which message service will they send the reminder to?

RSS to google reader

too soon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com