Well, what did Google lose? The title includes a subscript, "What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search", and yet, the article has almost nothing to actually say about the subject.
Nothing.
Instead of substantive contribution here, Mr. Jackson gives us simple-minded insinuations: if only Google had thought harder about how people use Twitter to talk real-time about the disasters, they would have realized what they would be missing out on.
Right, Mr. Jackson: as if there is a person in tech who missed the Egyptian riots. As if we all don't know about the thousands of Syrians who named their kid "Facebook".
The fact is, if Google did "end" their relationship with Twitter on purpose, then the real question here is why they would do that. Sticking your head into a search bar, complaining that you can't find Twitter results, and then pretending like no one else notices this is not an argument.
On the other hand, if you lather it up with a recent tragedy, it becomes journalism, doesn't it?
I say... if HN wanted to discuss Google changing their front-page search results to exclude realtime/twitter-like stuff this isn't the article to promote discussion.
But I suspect it's only on the front page because it's a topical (and terrible) news story that couldn't be on the homepage without some slight tech-angle to make it HN valid.
I work very close to where the explosion was. --I've never felt a building shake like that! Needless to say, we didn't know exactly what had happened at the time, but we knew it was bad enough that we should take heed of the fire alarm going off and leave the building.
Honestly, my plan is not to let this change my life or routine. If I don't do that, then I've let someone else take control of my life.
Of course, the gym I go to is going to be closed this weekend (they're even closer to the blast site than my office), but they've already posted that they'll be open again on Monday, so I have hope that Oslo - and Norway as a whole - won't let this change their society.
I meant directly in the aftermath. Secondary attacks on groups of onlookers to the first attack are calamitous. Think a car bomb or rifle attack on first responders/EMTs. And of course now we know he had designs on additional attacks.
Edit: This comment generated more debate than I expected, and I should have made it a little more detailed in the first place. I didn't mean to start a discussion on the type of information appropriate to HN.
It hardly needs to be stated that more than one reaction is possible simultaneously, and we don't need to spend the rest of our lives lamenting the event. However I think the headline would be better if it acknowledged that people have been seriously injured, i.e. if it was something more like 'Oslo tragedy highlights absence of RTS information on Google'. The way it stands now it's like writing a headline on the evening of 9/11 talking about the heat resistance of concrete.
When a tragedy happens, you don't have to restrict all your thought to the injured people. You can use some of it for other things, like pointing out that Google could have been a good source of information about this event if they had kept their realtime search.
I noticed that "Explosion in Oslo" article from the front page has been removed. My guess is because it isn't considered "hacker news" - a discussion we've had many times on this forum. So sadly, we have to resort to finding technical reasons to report major current events so they wouldn't be removed.
Or you could report them on sites that are for that kind of information. I applaud HN's determination to remain a site for hacker news, and not accept anything and everything that may affect a hacker in some way, shape or form.
Like I said, we've had this discussion many times before on HN. The short of it is, I don't want HN to devolve into a"current events" type of site either, but without the now-deleted article "Blast in Oslo," I wouldn't even know something happened (because I wouldn't have checked the news sites otherwise).
I accept HN just won't be my one-stop solution for major news (I may not like it, but that's a different story). My comment was just a probable explanation as to why the headline sounded insensitive.
On a related note (pardon me from replying to myself), as we should "...not accept anything and everything that may affect a hacker in some way, shape or form," I am strongly opposed to stories like "OS X Lion Released Today" or "Linux 3.0 released." In essence, these tidbits are just noise, worse than "current event" type stories because they are related to hackers, but really offer nothing interesting of value that we couldn't find on other sites (slashdot, techcrunch, et al). It is actually a news event disguised as an article.
More "Researchers develop tattoo that monitors glucose levels" and less "iOS 5 beta 4 is out," please!
Usually I would second that opinion. However, in this case I believe in the face of tragedy and/or very important events a community should disregard those restrictions and come together to exchange personal experiences and other information.
Well this is the hackers news website, if we want regular news on mundane stuff then we can go to msn yahoo google aol (hell twitter evidently) etc etc.
As far as it being insensitive, it's only like that if you feel everyone should mourn all the time for the thousands of tragic incidents that occur. Personally I would find life much less satisfying if I was busy being sad all the time.
And as for the article, it raises a highly valid point, google forsook a better system for one that isn't fully featured and as robust. I tend to think they did this so they can implement their own system, whether greed or control being the reason it stands to say that users will want the best, someone therefore should be pointing out stuff like this.
Seriously, how hard is it to: 1) type "Oslo" in the search text box, 2) press the "Google search" button, 3) click on the "News" link to the left? It's, to use a tired old phrase, as easy as 1-2-3. I find it rather tasteless to grab things like Oslo bombing and turn them into linkbait articles.
it's not obvious that there is news worth clicking for. ideally, you want google to say "this guy's interested in oslo? i bet he'd really like to know that something of note just happened over there". people who were searching for the news directly would have typed in "oslo bomb".
> people who were searching for the news directly would have typed in "oslo bomb".
Actually, the author of the article knew that something had happened in Oslo, but not what. That's exactly the kind of situation where news search is useful. He wants information on current events; news search is where I would expect to find that.
I'm really glad that it's a rainy holyday with not many people out in the streets, if it was a sunny day with a lot of people out in the streets and full offices it could have been a lot worse.
Some of my friends were in streets near the exposion while the windows exploded and they were quite shaken up.
As a social networking skeptic (no twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.) the only time I am tempted to dive into the social network, is when I hear about this kind of uncensored and real time information.
Lots of sources, perhaps none of them accurate, but tall of them together very informative, all very close to the action, and in real time, that is something impressive. But most importantly, it is something we will never get from traditional media.
Why Google has let this kind of service slip is beyond me.
I've been following this on Twitter, and frankly the search is useful for one thing only: identifying people who tweet from there. For any real information, you have to go directly to their full streams. The search results are cluttered to no end with retweets and it's hard to tell if the retweet you're seeing on the front page of results is of a story from two hours. Just identify the usernames of most commonly retweeted people and get the information from them.
Incidentally Google News has been very useful in locating more official accounts.
As an an example, right now (17:23 EST) the three top tweets for Utøya are from five, three, and three hours ago. One of them contains the unconfirmed/unofficial number of 20-30 dead on Utøya. The best official information available now (retrieved from a specific user's feed) is 10 dead, expected to rise.
Seriously? Twitter? You'd get a lot of noise and less signal.
I don't understand why its so difficult for the author to visit google news or press the news button to do a news search. Legitimate media beats twitter speculation.
OT: That blog brings me back to 90's web design in the worst way possible. It took me a minute to separate the content from the ads, and I'm still not sure if I actually read the post.
Since Google didn't turn around and immediately release a real-time Google+ search method, I think it's pretty safe to assume that this was entirely business related. It doesn't make much sense for Google to unilaterally kill the feature without having something to replace it.
It's also important to note that Twitter's contracts may not have expired with the other companies, or they were able to reach an agreement that both sides agreed to. Considering that Google was probably using a fairly considerable amount of Twitter's server time(and possibly bandwidth) to make the real-time search possible, I think that it's pretty safe to assume that Twitter wanted more money than Google was willing to pay.
It's also possible that Google wanted more or a better level of access than Twitter was willing to give. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever know the exact reasons why this has happened, because of all the NDAs that have to be around the actual contracts.
Either way, I'm still not sure that it's entirely Google's fault. At best, like any business deal that goes sour, both sides are at fault.
How many of those other companies offer a credible Twitter competitor? Twitter's chilly attitude toward third-party Twitter clients makes it seem moderately likely to me that they'd cut off Google's firehouse access to keep it out of Google+.
Can we please not try to capitalize on the linkbait value of a major terrorist incident?
Seriously, some stories do not have any technological aspect and I find stories like this to be extremely disrespectful of the people who had their lives turned upside down by this incident!
This is seriously scary, the buildings here shook and the blast was huge. I work like 4-500 meters away from the area (as the crow flies), still a bit shaken but luckily everyone at work are okay. Not so much those for those closer as you can see there are no windows left on that building.
This is a decent use-case for the elastic networks that Color touted ... if a social network was pulling all the public activity from those in the vicinity into an automatic, temporary group that people could follow, the result would filter out people just using the hashtag to comment and leave a feed of raw on-the-spot info
Interesting, if you did the search on blekko.com (and disclosure here, I work for Blekko) we pick up the Reuters story (we've got a onebox if your search is showing up in the news).
I think what The Atlantic is complaining about here is more that without the Twitter stream, Google has lost access to a signal that they may want to start crawling around looking for stuff.
Given the alleged amounts of robot traffic on Twitter I wonder if they dealt with robo-tweeting trying to drive them to put particular sites up in their news page.
I'm not sure what the problem is. I search for Oslo and get current news in the 'news' section just below the map, general info, etc. If I click on last 24 hours I get even more current news.
Nothing.
Instead of substantive contribution here, Mr. Jackson gives us simple-minded insinuations: if only Google had thought harder about how people use Twitter to talk real-time about the disasters, they would have realized what they would be missing out on.
Right, Mr. Jackson: as if there is a person in tech who missed the Egyptian riots. As if we all don't know about the thousands of Syrians who named their kid "Facebook".
The fact is, if Google did "end" their relationship with Twitter on purpose, then the real question here is why they would do that. Sticking your head into a search bar, complaining that you can't find Twitter results, and then pretending like no one else notices this is not an argument.
On the other hand, if you lather it up with a recent tragedy, it becomes journalism, doesn't it?