Ah. Well, the decision to kill Code Search would make sense if it were in favour of something better. But then why kill it now and leave nothing for any length of time? Also, there's no guarantee the new thing will turn out to actually be better.
For a company that succeeded partly by leveraging the economic value of hackers in a way that hadn't been been done before, this decision is disturbingly out of character. It feels like something that must have happened for inward-facing political reasons - in other words, a sign of rot.
I get that Steve told Larry to focus, but "code" and "search" almost define focus in their case.
Historically, there were two types of projects at Google: the one that's deprecated and the one that doesn't work yet. It seems they have amended that slightly so now it's break-before-make during a migration instead of the other way around.
For a company that succeeded partly by leveraging the economic value of hackers in a way that hadn't been been done before, this decision is disturbingly out of character. It feels like something that must have happened for inward-facing political reasons - in other words, a sign of rot.
I get that Steve told Larry to focus, but "code" and "search" almost define focus in their case.
Edit: It seems the service is still available under a different URL. Weird, but I'll happily take it! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3487950