this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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I'm still in disbelief having heard this for the first time today.

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[–] AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca 142 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Don't build on or depend on google products.. That is the message they are sending

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.

[–] sarsaparilyptus@lemmy.fmhy.ml 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren't. They're in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.

[–] FoxBJK@midwest.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Google is in whatever business they decide to be, and saying that they're expected to leave abruptly because the well dried up is not an acceptable answer. Ultimately it just tarnishes the brand and dooms whatever new things they try to venture into. Stadia never got off the ground for this very reason.

Google's not going to be able to collect a lot of data if no one trusts them to run a service for more than a couple years. Hell, can I even trust them to keep Chromium going at this point!? Surely they won't let that waterfall of data dry up...

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[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago
[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

Yes you said new product now they are killing established products. This has been out for just under a decade.

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Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don't know how to keep great products alive, and I'm tired of getting suckered punched by them.

Exceptions are Android (because there's no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they'd probably improve!

[–] Shinhoshi@infosec.pub 11 points 1 year ago

Came here to comment that — glad it was the first comment

This site is interesting... every time you reload it, the short blurb about each tool changes. Is it using a llm, or do they write alts that get served at random?

[–] Thalestr@beehaw.org 88 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The Google Graveyard grows ever larger. Nearly at 300 now.

[–] nlm@beehaw.org 28 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is basically their business model/modus operandi

[–] Whimseymimple@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This was a trip back in time, seeing things like Meebo and Picasa that G purchased and killed off. 😕

[–] abc123@lemmy.fmhy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's just the nature of corporate pirates, they loot and plunder what they can use and integrate into their own products then scuttle the rest

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[–] SenorBolsa@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.

[–] Wizard@lemmy.dustybeer.com 12 points 1 year ago

This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn't belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren't able to transfer their domains. It's not the end of the world.

But I guess people can feel good posting "Don't be evil I guess" over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they've "warned people forever" not to use any Google service ever.

[–] johnthedoe@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

I still miss igoogle at times

[–] FoxBJK@midwest.social 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We can’t even trust google to run a registrar!?

[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm still amazed that they decided to do this, given how involved they are with this type of thing.

I had already moved to porkbun, but Google Sites was such an easy way to make a simple webpage with a domain.

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[–] BobQuasit@beehaw.org 50 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of "don't be evil" as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.

[–] BricksDont@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I use Google Fi for my cell service and have loved it, but them killing off or selling so many of their products has me real nervous over here...

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[–] StrayCatFrump@beehaw.org 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google's privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer's personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company's privacy notice.

Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn't mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google's whim.

But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It's not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s

[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 12 points 1 year ago

I think what they mean to say is, me big you small

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[–] lightrush@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is so fucking annoying. I specifically used Google Domains so I can have a trivial email forwarding to my Gmail without data exiting Google's servers.

[–] atheos@lemmy.atheos.org 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm in the same boat you are, I had numerous domains (over a dozen) each with e-mail forwards to a single gmail account. I ended moving my domain registration to AWS Route 53 and pointing my DNS over to cloudflare. Cloudflare offers both DNS and e-mail forwarding for free, so I'm back in business. They also provide analytics on email forwarding that google lacked. not gonna miss google one bit.

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[–] AdamantiteAdventurer@beehaw.org 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yep... I saw this last week and transferred my domain to CloudFlare afterwards. It took me a day or two to get it all fixed back up with my iCloud stuff and other DNS crap, but it's done now. I'm really getting sick of google killing all their products.

[–] Kizaing@lemmy.kizaing.ca 12 points 1 year ago

Same thing for me, my domains were set to renew in August, but I transferred to Hover (cloudflare didn't directly support my tld) but I set up my nameservers with Cloudflare.

Everything google touches dies, I'm very distrustful of any of their services, I should probably think of moving off gmail too haha

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[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They had 10 million domains (according to the article). Even with a successful business they drop stuff. Maybe I am a fool!

[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 7 points 1 year ago

only 10 million domains?

Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw "what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it"

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[–] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I'd share my email response from Google when I asked them "how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?" They responded with:

Based on the summary you have shared, I understand that you need help with your general inquiry about the Google Domains transition to Squarespace. To answer this, if you will be transferring your domains out of Google, all of the data will also be removed. This means that once the transition between Squarespace and Google happens, your data will also be removed.

I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:

I'm sorry for the confusion. To be clear, Squarespace will not receive any of your Google Domains data. Only the active domain names, excluding the domain names that have been deleted or transferred out, will be affected by the data shift to Squarespace.

So if I trust their word, it means, if I've already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn't receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that's true.

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[–] yacgta@infosec.pub 22 points 1 year ago

I mean, this is Google we're talking about...

[–] PascalSausage@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
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[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Been bought by square spaces.

Squarespace announced today it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which will be winding down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.

[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Who are surprisingly expensive.

[–] goji@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m super pissed about this.

I have a ton of client domains registered with google, and squarespace’s pricing is double.

They had by far the best platform I’ve used for managing domains. This sucks.

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[–] Dixzy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’m so annoyed. Squarespace is the worst

[–] chrisn@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I thought that was godaddy?

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[–] bl4kers@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

Google Fi customers beware. I've been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument "well actually it's easy for them to run and profitable so it's definitely safe." By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products

[–] administrator@lemmy.pro 12 points 1 year ago

Hold up - can anyone else read many of the comments in this thread and notice that many seem to be bots, all repeating comments by other users but slightly changed as if by AI and automated?

The commentary in this thread reads as very unnatural. (I agree with the skepticism of Google, it’s not that, it’s the syntax of the thread).

[–] vanderbilt@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

If you made yourself dépendant on a Google product then that’s the risk you assumed. They can and will kill off products at a whim, history has made that very evident.

[–] tappyturtle@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago

Google: the grim reaper of online services

[–] kiddblur@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A few years ago I hit a point where the Google graveyard got so large that I no longer trust them with any of my stuff. I know the mantra is to always have multiple backups of important stuff, but I’ve started doing Google drive, OneDrive, iCloud, AND local (own cloud) copies of stuff because you just never know when Google is going to decide to kill Google maps or Google photos or whatever.

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[–] pixxel@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago

This is so frustrating, I knew that I should never trust google but i still fell for the slickness and how easy it is to administrate domains on google domains so I've been buying all my domains through them... I really really gotta learn to stop trusting google and basically never use their products.

[–] tymon@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Lots of top-quality dumb news this week

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I don't transfer mine, it will still exist, right? I will just need to manage it from Squarespace instead of google domains?

[–] Malossi167@feddit.de 12 points 1 year ago

Yes but also expect to pay more. IIRC they will honor google's pricing for the first year but afterward you more likely than not have to pay more. And you might lose some features you use.

I transferred my domains out as soon as I heard of the purchase a few days ago. It's a shame but not a surprise given Google's desire to kill anything that gets good.

I don't think I have any infrastructure that runs on Google anymore with that done, which is a shame as I like their products before they are shut down

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

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