Just chiming in to tell my disastrous experience with the deprecation of Classic Sites.
A few weeks ago, we activated GSuite for our organization, and from then on could no longer access our Classic Sites.
After a long and confusing support chat session, it turns out that our Classic Sites were simply wiped without a warning when we activated our GSuite for the same domain, because of a bug due to some funky deprecation-stuff of Classic Sites.
So yeah, we're pretty pissed that us subscribing to another Google product caused our old stuff to be deleted because of a bug. But it's not that surprising given the rush Google is apparently in to deprecate Classic Sites.
Oh, and I don't think Google's gonna take the time to fix this until the final ditch, so be wary if you still have Classic Sites and are getting GSuite soon!
m0xte 1353 days ago [-]
This smells like typical google. I naively signed up for GSuite for my domain earlier this year. After a week of ticket tennis with their support, they couldn’t work out how to fix me hitting gmail and it instantly redirecting to the admin console.
Also they require £30 payment (well $30 dollars with no other info on how to pay it in any other currency) to allow your org to create YouTube accounts now for some reason otherwise it throws an error. This is a policy decision.
Whole thing feels like an incoherent poorly designed mess.
I use O365 now which actually works properly so fuck ‘em.
felbane 1352 days ago [-]
>Whole thing feels like an incoherent poorly designed mess.
You can say this about the majority of Google products. They gain momentum because Google, but under the hood they're crap.
One of the best decisions I made was dropping Google and self-hosting my public-facing services. In this day and age, it's much easier to set up reliable, available services without needing an in-house data center. IMO, it's worth the small extra hosting cost to be the master of your own domain (heh).
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
I'm sorry, this sounds like a terrible experience. If you're comfortable, could you send me an email with the ticket # so myself or someone on the team can look into it? My email is zito@. Any additional context would be helpful too.
nradov 1353 days ago [-]
So once again we see that formal Google support channels are worthless, and the only way to get issues resolved is to complain in public.
unicornporn 1352 days ago [-]
Yes, that's how it works. Strong voice & solid platform equals instant assistance. Basically an influncer first support system. I don't go near them anymore.
atsuzaki 1352 days ago [-]
This seems to be a case with a lot of companies, too (not just the giants). It's such a shame.
mercer 1353 days ago [-]
acting like it's just a 'terrible experience' and not a fundamental Google issue is a bit disingenuous. I understand you get paid to do this, but have you no shame?
dang 1352 days ago [-]
Attacking a fellow HN user like this is not ok. People need to be free to show up to discuss their work here without getting ripped a new asshole. Please don't post like this, regardless of how you feel about someone's employer.
That's way too harsh on them. I for one am very glad that someone there acceeded that's it's a terrible experience, regardless of whether they have the ability to change the approach.
freehunter 1353 days ago [-]
But this happens every week, and it’s been happening for years. The only way to get the attention of someone at Google is by making a post on HN or Twitter and hoping your audience is big enough that it becomes uncomfortable for Google.
Yeah it’s nice that this person is getting help. But what about all the other people who don’t have an audience who can raise their tickets up to this level? Why doesn’t Google support just work the way it’s supposed to work? I’d be willing to celebrate this if it was a rare occurrence but it’s not. It’s way too common. If there are any humans at Google, they sure don’t seem to care about their paying customers.
The flagged parent comment is not talking about the actual problem, and is instead imagining some malicious nature in the googler's comment.
bergstromm466 1353 days ago [-]
Do you think they make enough money to provide support?
freehunter 1352 days ago [-]
Google? Yes I believe Google makes enough money to provide support.
Was that a joke?
Dylan16807 1353 days ago [-]
Huh? Saying it's a terrible experience says nothing at all about how common it is. Your rage is misdirected.
freehunter 1353 days ago [-]
Seems like it’s directed at the only Google employee they were able to get in contact with. Sucks that it’s directed at the wrong person, but that’s 100% Google’s fault for not properly staffing their support teams.
joshuamorton 1352 days ago [-]
The person who did the attacking wasn't even the person with the support issue. It was just a random person who decided to attack a Google employee trying to be nice.
rhizome 1351 days ago [-]
"Trying to be nice?" I don't think that captures the subtleties of reinforcing a stereotype. Google has a well-earned reputation here and it should be acknowledged, not ignored or dismissed.
agentdrtran 1353 days ago [-]
I was doing a domain transfer and didn't realize changing the primary domain will also nuke all your classic sites, for seemingly no reason. That was a fun cleanup...
prepend 1353 days ago [-]
I got an email yesterday reminding me to take care of my classic sites.
The converter theoretically converted the sites, but they went from being a perfectly useful, although basic looking site to looking fucked up and broken.
It’s an anti-feature to do this. It’s sort of free, so I can’t make too much of a complaint.
But it’s a reminder that nothing Google lasts. I just needed a simple list of google docs 10 years ago for a project. The saddest part is remembering how I felt to have that tool available to me back then. I never expected that Google would turn into whatever they are now.
“Organize the world’s information, in a Zip file, in a private cloud folder, making it not useful at all.”
neonate 1353 days ago [-]
I got that email too, went through the conversion process, and the converted site is completely ruined. None of the images came through, the layout is wrecked, it's unreadable, and the old site is now inaccessible.
I wish I had thought to save the old URL in the Internet Archive beforehand, but it never occurred to me that Google's conversion process would just destroy it.
easton 1353 days ago [-]
This isn’t entirely evil. They give you a full HTML dump to host elsewhere, or if you like what they did with the migration, you can just click a button to sign off and they publish it.
Just have to hope people notice before their sites go offline.
andybak 1353 days ago [-]
They could host the static dumps in perpetuity at the same urls.
The cost would be a rounding error for them.
Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Project? I hope so. That would absolve them to some degree.
I know a company shouldn't be responsible for storing people's content indefinitely but I hate the fact that human culture has become so transient.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the sites as static dumps and continue serving them. At no point was the cost in terms of compute/storage/network even a consideration.
In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on.
In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost.
I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.
jotaf 1353 days ago [-]
> significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience
A few things to consider:
- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.
- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution.
- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.
john-shaffer 1353 days ago [-]
> The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.
That ship has sailed. Google's reputation for instability can't get any worse. At this point, it would take a complete 180° and a good 5-10 years of angelic behavior from Google for me to even consider relying on them in any capacity.
thaumasiotes 1353 days ago [-]
I was going to say the same. The reputational damage is significant if Google is actively trying to change their reputation, but zero if not.
lizardmancan 1352 days ago [-]
gmail is still nice. I wonder when they are going to "work" on that.
i stll giggle at my ignorance thinking they wouldnt do youtube and search.
i really mis search, it was such a nice product. Now it is so bad that internet natives who could slap together a website in 20 min dont understand when i ask them why they have no website of their own. "you mean like a resume?"
they are right of course. no one would ever find it.
quest88 1353 days ago [-]
Just a quick rebuttal to your second point:
Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard.
There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring?
Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements?
You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.
wikibob 1353 days ago [-]
And yet Amazon Web Services manages to STILL support SimpleDB. Many years (nearly a decade?) after being deprecated.
This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work.
Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?
joshuamorton 1353 days ago [-]
The effort required to maintain a single non-changing binary, while nonzero, is far, faaar less, than the ongoing effort required to maintain user facing tools with regulatory compliance issues.
zwily 1353 days ago [-]
Why do you say SimpleDB is a single binary?
lizardmancan 1352 days ago [-]
have someone else put the dump behind a paywall.
ramses0 1353 days ago [-]
“Google search doesn’t surface sites hosted on google sites, therefore the sites get no visitors, therefore we will remove the sites. Q.E.D.”
“””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
TLightful 1353 days ago [-]
“””Our company mission is to organize the world's * adverts * and make them universally accessible and useful.”””
Fixed. I have no use for Google any more.
They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
jolmg 1353 days ago [-]
> I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors).
That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless.
If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.
reaperducer 1353 days ago [-]
I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old
If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."
giantrobot 1353 days ago [-]
Yeah, old information is never useful. Might as well just delete it all. Badly styled information? Worthless. Delete it and zero out the drives.
mdriley 1353 days ago [-]
Every problem you describe was successfully worked through for the Google Code turndown in 2016.
JeremyHerrman 1353 days ago [-]
Thanks for describing both the technical and business challenges involved in running real services that real people rely on, even when the service appears simple and straightforward to outsiders (even smart hn commenters). Though, it still sucks to have yet another product enter the Google Graveyard.
In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.
ghaff 1353 days ago [-]
Human culture has always been so transient. How many diaries, family photos, letters (even/especially email), etc. from even 30 years ago have been preserved? Much less 100 years. What has been passed down, especially publicly, are pretty rare exceptions.
minimuffins 1353 days ago [-]
I don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bothered to destroy them, and could be found later.
It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
ghaff 1353 days ago [-]
Certainly digital information has to be deliberately preserved and doing so has challenges relative to anything physical. That said, with a few exceptions (e.g. papyrus in very dry conditions), pretty much anything on paper/parchment needs to be deliberately preserved as well. And, as you get to wetter climates e.g. Britain, there is very little preserved from post-Roman Medieval times.
But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
I think hosting the static dumps for owners that don't approve the auto-migration (and don't manually migrate) would be a great idea. Sure, you can't update your site without migrating in the future, but you can always fix up the auto-migration after the fact. The important thing is that this would keep the old sites alive with a high fidelity.
JaggedJax 1353 days ago [-]
I just went in to migrate a site of mine as a test and it broke every single image and most or all of the internal links. If they can't even migrate the basics like images and internal links, then they really didn't put much effort into this at all and most people will have lots of work to actually migrate their site.
sp332 1353 days ago [-]
No one is looking at most of these old sites. The email addresses are defunct or the authors are dead. Google is deciding to remove huge amounts of web history, again.
jhrmnn 1353 days ago [-]
Turning off a server on its own isn’t removing web history. Even google cannot be forced to host websites for free indefinitely.
sp332 1353 days ago [-]
Google is still offering to host the sites though. They are just deciding to delete a bunch of them. And while they have a legal right to remove the sites, we can still hold them accountable for how they use that power.
Turning off a web server on its own isn't removing web history
When Google targets sites that are least likely to have a backup anywhere else, least likely to have active admins, least likely for an admin to notice an email notification in an old inbox, I'm pretty sure that's deleting web history.
1353 days ago [-]
LunaSea 1353 days ago [-]
I thought that this was what AMP was about.
Huh, must have been about something else.
caiobegotti 1353 days ago [-]
That migration click is far from working okay. I tried in a very simple-page-text-only-with-paragraphs-one-uploaded-image I had using a Web Font, an embedded Spreadsheet and an embeeded Maps area, all owned by Google. The layout got so broken that I didn't publish it and it's in the draft state after the migration. It looks really shitty.
iso1210 1353 days ago [-]
"all owned by Google"
There's your problem
irontinkerer 1353 days ago [-]
Sounds good, but I don’t know a lot of “active” Google Sites admins. Is Google going to offer a searchable cache? When I google search a hard question, many times I’m brought to Google Sits
We’re going to lose a valuable source of old data if former admins don’t show up, do the work, and rehost
gtfoutttt 1348 days ago [-]
How did you get the full HTML dump?
They only gave me a "converted site" in my gdrive when I downloaded from the migration manager.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
Hi folks - my name is Matt, and I lead the "Presentation & Ideation" product team inside of Google/G Suite, which includes Classic and New Sites. This project has been in the works for a while, so I'm happy to answer questions or take feedback here or you can email me at zito@(the google). Obviously my opinions are my own.
naetius 1353 days ago [-]
Hi Matt,
thanks for the AMA-like availability, really appreciate it.
One question from me: how would you pitch "new Sites" for a potential new customer willing to use it, but afraid his/her/their content might not last the next "modernization" sweep?
In other words: would you try to sell new Sites to a customer that values - and worries about - long term visibility of his/her/their content?
If no: what is new Sites' value proposition, in terms of target market?
Thanks again.
unixhero 1353 days ago [-]
Hi,
Why do you (your team) really have do do this?
This is digital destruction. It's not about the features you shipped in 2008, and what those look like to a 2020 audience. It's about the content(!) which is part of the human creative endeavour.
Thanks for taking questions.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
I think this is an interesting point - I will say that the vast vast majority of these sites (unfortunately I can't disclose the number) have not received edits or even visits for more than two years. To me, archiving those sites doesn't feel like destruction, it feels like backing up unused content and protecting it for the user. From our research, a lot of users don't realize that these sites are still published, and in some cases don't want this content out there in the world. I think it's relevant that people should have control over their own information and what is live on the web.
That being said, I hear the feedback, and I'll talk to the team about what we might be able to do, within legal and privacy constraints, to protect published sites.
cyphar 1353 days ago [-]
Sadly, this mentality reminds me a lot of the great GeoCities purge of 2009. Have you considered partnering with the Internet Archive to back up any publicly-accessible classic sites which you plan to purge?
Whether or not a site has had visitors recently isn't a fair measure of the importance of those sites -- for instance, there were examples of digital shrines in GeoCities and Yahoo still decided to eradicate them all. It was only thanks to projects like the Internet Archive that we haven't lost that period of internet history just to free up some disk platter space.
EDIT: I also am struggling to understand what this means:
> To me, archiving those sites doesn't feel like destruction, it feels like backing up unused content and protecting it for the user.
What does "archiving" mean here? Will the sites still be accessible or not? Is "archive" here a euphemism for "delete" -- in which case, how is it not like destruction and how is it like a "backup"? I'm not sure most people would consider "rm -rf" to be a backup strategy, but it definitely does have very good storage density.
csours 1353 days ago [-]
There's a big disconnect between technological work and emotional work. If I make myself a digital scrapbook online, it may not have many visitors (or any) just like a scrapbook may sit on a shelf for years without being touched; but the emotional impact when you do pick it up again is huge. Kind of like comparing a scrapbook to a best seller novel.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
"Archiving" means that each site will be converted into an HTML export and placed in their Google Drive, and a separate copy will be converted to a new site and placed in a draft (unpublished) state in their Google Drive. They can choose to republish that new Site, or take the HTML export and move it to a new platform of their choosing.
prepend 1353 days ago [-]
And thus taking it offline.
My concern isn’t that the files don’t exist any more,I think it’s nice to zip it and add it to the owners gdrive, my concern is that the files are no longer accessible on the web. So all the links are broken, no longer in search, etc.
This seems like a much larger issue than archiving and it would be cool to hear how you all decided to take the sites offline.
Is it a cost issue? I imagine hosting a billion static sites shouldn’t cost much.
dwheeler 1353 days ago [-]
> I will say that the vast vast majority of these sites (unfortunately I can't disclose the number) have not received edits or even visits for more than two years
I'm having a hard time understanding why that would justify deleting that information forever. If anything, that suggests that providing static access would be enough and nearly zero-cost. Storage costs are a fraction of what they were.
I do a lot of searching for computer-related historical information, e.g., looking for rationales of "why something happened". Once information is destroyed it's often impossible to recover. No one might look at it for 30 years, and then there's only one retrieval but it was an important retrieval.
We've had a tremendous loss of recent information. This isn't the only example, but it's an important one. I'd like to see information retained, not lost.
bachmeier 1353 days ago [-]
> From our research, a lot of users don't realize that these sites are still published, and in some cases don't want this content out there in the world.
I had forgotten about my Google site until seeing this posted. The last update of any kind was early 2013; most content was from 2011 or earlier. Some of the information on the site is wrong, a lot irrelevant, and worst of all, someone might not find my real site because of that one. I'd much prefer a dead site stop working to leaving it out there.
freehunter 1353 days ago [-]
Now imagine your the opposite of that. You know is the site exists, and all the info and links are still accurate and still directs customers to your business. And then it disappears through no fault of your own.
I mean.. if I don’t use my Facebook account anymore I wouldn’t expect Facebook to delete everyone else’s profile?
teach 1353 days ago [-]
My anecdata agrees; I received the email and _vaguely_ remember maybe having done this at some point. Certainly it's nothing I want to keep, whatever it is.
Yet when I visited the Classic Sites Manager it shows nothing. ("0 owned by you" and 0s all the way down the rest of the suggested filters.)
False positive, maybe? The email sounded like y'all were pretty certain: "We’ve identified that you own one or more ACTIVE classic Sites."
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
Possibly? It's possible that the emails were sent on a data pull at some point, and in between data pull and emailing, you deleted the classic site. Or potentially there was a wire crossed somewhere. I apologize for the extra email either way - if the Classic Sites Manager shows no sites, you are good to go.
Apocryphon 1353 days ago [-]
Are you at least designing New Sites in a way to make them easier to archive and preserve, after they are scrapped in 2032?
rhizome 1351 days ago [-]
That would be a feature, so it needs to provide some kind of benefit to someone's career in order to be implemented. This is only for launching the feature, and maintenance is still unlikely.
brajesh 1353 days ago [-]
I’ve about a dozen Google sites which are just an embedded Google form with a custom script at the back.
I tried the conversion tool on a dummy site and it opened a Google doc. I am not sure how an HTML page with embedded Google form with a script will be converted to new Sites.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
If you're comfortable, can you ping me on email at zito@? It's possible the custom script is the issue, but I'd be happy to take a look.
tuyguntn 1353 days ago [-]
how are you going to compete with MS office suite or similar, in any enterprise solution space if Google has bad reputation with product maintenance and shutting down products so fast?
UPD: I assume Google Sites has lots of customers (we were one of them)
laurencerowe 1353 days ago [-]
Any chance of supporting arbitrary static sites behind a login screen? You can almost do it with a Google cloud storage bucket but you have to put it behind a load balancer for https and the IAP login gate is not supported for bucket backends making it unsuitable for intranet sites.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
It's a good question - I know we looked at the possibility of a cloud storage bucket, but there were some technical challenges there (possibly what you describe). Do you want to shoot me an email at zito@ and I can try to find someone to answer that question?
prirun 1351 days ago [-]
I have a Classic Site for Hashbackup.com. The pages are very basic text, with some bolding, italics, font face/size changes.
Every page in the zip backup, no matter how simple, is around 59K because of all the Javascript Google wraps around simple text. My plan is to convert everything to some flavor of Markdown, but parsing this mess is not going to be exactly easy.
I appreciate that the goal of this backup was to allow me to host it "as is" somewhere else - with no possibility to edit it, which seems rather useless.
What would be really nice is to also get a zip file with some simple Markdown pages that include user editing (font sizes, bolding, etc), without everything being wrapped in Google's Javascript.
weejewel 1353 days ago [-]
Hi Matt. Last time I checked the new Sites didn’t have per-page permissions for a G Suite organization. Is this still the case?
1353 days ago [-]
EamonnMR 1353 days ago [-]
Do you have a plan to offer backups to the Internet Archive/etc?
easton_s 1353 days ago [-]
When are we getting an API for new sites?
rurban 1353 days ago [-]
Hi Matt,
What was the rationale for this project? The joy of destruction?
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites. The vast majority of users are choosing to create their sites with new Sites, and the vast majority of current classic sites receive no edits and no traffic.
We first announced this gradual plan in 2017, with an update in 2019, and now we're providing the detailed plan. The goal was to provide adequate notice for people to figure out whether migration, export, or deletion of their classic sites makes the most sense.
EDIT: to the multiple people that are highlighting that 12 years is not a long time, I should clarify. I agree that 12 years in Internet time is not a long time, but it is a very long time in "how websites work" time.
One of the big challenges in the website builder space, something that Google. Wix, Squarespace, have all dealt with - is that when a user publishes a website, there's an expectation around the fidelity and look-and-feel of that website. The data model and architecture for how you represent a rendered page, how you render embedded content, all are very dependent on how browsers work at that time, and the maintenance of those things can become very challenging.
There was a big shift about ~7 years ago, moving away from a "pixel perfect" layout/raw html approach (Wix, Old wordpress, SQSP 5, Classic Sites), to one where there's some sort of grid-and-box approach where the render is responsive, there's reflow, there's padding and spacing and styling relative to the browser experience. It separates out content from layout to a certain degree in a way that is much more future-proofed and modern. This is how Wix ADI, Squarespace 6+, Wordpress Gutenberg, and new Sites work.
For all of those transitions, there was a platform shift, that required a complete rework of how the system works. My point about "12 years" was that the model of how classic Sites works is 12 years old, and new Sites was intended to match the modern way of how websites are built and delivered.
Wowfunhappy 1353 days ago [-]
> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites.
In this particular case, with Google Sites, maybe the decision was totally justified, I don't know. But, as a general trend across the technology industry, this type of explanation really bothers me, and I think it speaks to a serious mindset problem.
The fact that X is old and Y is new is not a reason to replace X with Y. Hammers are old, but they're also exceedingly useful tools. Users are familiar with how hammers work, and companies have become good at manufacturing them.
The question should be whether the new tool is better than the old one, and if it is, whether it's so much better that forcing every user to re-learn the new tool will be worth their while. And even then, it's worth asking why some of the largest companies in the world can't let both tools coexist, perhaps with the older one kept semi-hidden to avoid confusing new users.
Anyway, sorry for picking on you, I appreciate your willingness to pop into a somewhat-hostile thread. :)
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
It's very fair feedback - I updated my response to highlight that the reason is not that classic sites is old, and old is bad, and new sites is new, and hence good. It's more that the way websites are built and rendered changed fundamentally ~7 years ago, and classic sites just doesn't match the way that needs to work today. All of the major website builders have tried to find a path from "raw html" to "content management system" and been unable to, and had a platform split at some point.
dwheeler 1353 days ago [-]
No, I'm sorry, that's just not so.
A website maintained with raw HTML still works just fine on modern web browsers. In fact, it works much better. Web pages built with some CMS systems often take 5-20 seconds to load, while the "raw HTML" sites load in fractions of a second. In fact, the speedups continue; JavaScript parsing is slow, while HTML parsing is fast, and HTML compresses like magic. So a "big" HTML file is transferred and displayed in remarkably fast time.
I wouldn't use raw HTML in all cases, but I also wouldn't use a fancy CMS in all cases.
It's okay to use different platforms for different purposes.
Robotbeat 1353 days ago [-]
I just transitioned my sites, and I really dislike the reflow and mobilification of the websites. Makes it much less useful, especially on smaller screens. Stuff (like side bar info) is hidden away behind hamburger menu buttons instead of immediately visible in a compact format.
This mobilification is a fad, and like many fads it will, too, disappear and have to be replaced (requiring many work hours) because ultimately it’s less usable especially for largely static content. There’s no option to keep a similar look and feel. “Mobile first” has been forced upon us and is now, with reflow, “mobile only.” Imagine if Arxiv required PDFs to be replaced by mobilified versions? So annoying and impractical.
Really disappointed. Google made a bunch of work for themselves just to reduce the usability of older web pages.
Bjartr 1353 days ago [-]
Why not leave it up to the authors of a site to decide if it needs to be rebuilt in a new system. That people's daily usage of the web is different today does render content written for the older paradigm valueless.
Google's misson is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Dropping sites on the cutting room floor because information in them isn't in a convenient format does not make that information accessible or useful.
msla 1353 days ago [-]
> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008)
Anything I can say would only detract from this.
This is modern Google.
gtfoutttt 1353 days ago [-]
Amen. 12 years is not long in anyone's eyes except for SV.
stickfigure 1353 days ago [-]
Then should I assume you're reading this on IE7?
m4rtink 1353 days ago [-]
12 years is not a long time even just by enterprise software standards. The RHEL/Fedora Anaconda installer Git history goes back to 1999 (was CVS initially and then imported to Git) and that's just when tracking was first used, it existed many years before that.
Also RHEL support lifecycles are 11+ years, so for RHEL 8 released in 2019, that's a commitment to ~2030 right here and there & with doing this for many years for the past releases proving the point.
No wonder the most critical stuff (Bank, Stock exchnages, etc.) run on RHEL and not on some half baked Google stuff that will get deprecated from under them at a moments notice.
fermienrico 1353 days ago [-]
Externally, as you know, Google‘a reputation hasn’t been great when it comes to maintaining their services.
What should have happened is to turn Classic Sites (and new Sites) itself into Squarespace competitor.
I just see this as a massive failure of vision and execution.
Why didn’t they improve classic sites and added yet another product called Sites? May be I am seeing some internal politics surface as fragmentation of product line.
mattzito 1353 days ago [-]
Fundamentally, classic sites works differently than new sites. It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive. That's a table-stakes feature for website builders today.
To your Squarespace comparison, Squarespace went through a similar transition - Squarespace 5 worked very similar to Classic Sites, and was replaced with Squarespace 6, which was a complete end-to-end rewrite.
rhizome 1351 days ago [-]
It's starting to sound like this "mobilization" process is the marquee project pushing this, if Google is still a "nothing gets done that won't result in a promotion" shop, which is another stereotype the company has built for itself.
Also, people have technical knowledge here, even if they've never been hired by someone as "the best of the best," or having graduated from a top 10 CS school, so handwaving "fundamentally works differently" is not actually likely to be the enlightening description you might hope it would be.
dwheeler 1353 days ago [-]
> It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive.
Huh? Did that 10 years ago. Perhaps we have a different definition of a "classic site".
To me a "classic site" is another name for a static site, that is, a website where the HTML to be served is pregenerated. Static sites are now coming back, not going away. But I always assumed that a website should reflow.
Perhaps when you say "classic site" you mean "site that assumes that all users have the same display size". I agree that such classic sites are nonsense today. But they were always nonsense. At no time was there a guarantee of any particular screen size for HTML, and it's always been easy to write HTML that just reflows. If you do that, your site works just fine.
dragonwriter 1353 days ago [-]
> Perhaps we have a different definition of a "classic site".
GP didn't say “classic site” they said “classic sites website”. You seem to be interpreting that as intended to be a somewhat redundant and mispunctuated rendering of “classic site’s website”, but given that the context is a discussion for the shutdown of Google’s classic Sites in favor of only supporting Google’s new Sites mode, I think that it's just a capitalization-omitted rendering of “classic Sites website”, that is, a website using classic Google Sites as opposed to new Google Sites.
fermienrico 1353 days ago [-]
Yea, I think Google should continue to revamp things under the same product name. It is giving it a bad reputation for discontinuation of products left and right.
Could have called it Classic Sites 2.
dragonwriter 1353 days ago [-]
The product name is Google Sites. With the introduction of the new configuration for that product in parallel, “classic” and “new” distinguished the available configuration. Classic now stops being the default and in a little over a year goes away, but the product (Google Sites) stays.
globular-toast 1353 days ago [-]
12 years is a "very long time"? What is considered a "long time" or a "short time"?
rohan1024 1353 days ago [-]
Why so rude? You can't blame OP for Google's decisions.
rasz 1353 days ago [-]
Google is not sentient, someone inside Google decided to get a promotion by launching a "new thing", at the cost of deleting old content.
BillinghamJ 1353 days ago [-]
As the product lead on the team, it likely is their decision (not to say that excuses rudeness though)
fermienrico 1353 days ago [-]
I don’t think it’s rude to tell people facts, this person is leading this effort.
abstractbarista 1353 days ago [-]
It's interesting how some people talk. I run a server for free that people store things on. They become irate when I no longer wish to provide the free service. Is that reasonable?
My belief has always been "no". Google could kill off the entirety of GMail tomorrow, and I'd be disappointed, but totally understanding.
stallmanite 1353 days ago [-]
Are you a giant multinational that will need to convince people to store stuff on your server in the future? If not then this doesn’t apply to you so you can happily delete everything on your server.
1353 days ago [-]
steelframe 1353 days ago [-]
Thanks to an email I received about this, I rediscovered a site from 2011 that a group of technologists in my domain (myself included) built to track some multi-company collaborative Open Source work. While that ended up going nowhere after about a month or two of wishful thinking, I'm now the hiring manager for a role that requires skills that the members of the group have. Some of them are about to get invites to interview.
demadog 1353 days ago [-]
Google could make a super compelling product that essentially turned a Google Doc or Sheet file into a website.
I know others have done this, but if Google built it and tied it into their Maps product and then ads it would theoretically make it extremely easy for a local barber to control it all in Google and Google would see incremental ad spend.
Instead Sites has been ignored, Blogger has languished, and Squarespace and WordPress are now the defacto tools for SMBs.
Kind of a head scratcher.
TheChaplain 1353 days ago [-]
I hope the archive.org-team may have a shot at the inactive sites before they disappear.
bliss 1353 days ago [-]
Ha, I have a couple, created in 2011 - who knew (well... remembered!) - now going to archive and delete them
xen2xen1 1353 days ago [-]
Yeah, I got this message and was surprised that:
1. Such a thing exists.
2. I had a site that was blank.
I might even use the new version for however long it lasts.
Surprisingly, I had 4 sites dating back to 2009 on my account. There was absolutely no content of interest on there, but it was a nice trip down the memory lane for me.
mkj 1353 days ago [-]
I assume there's some technical problem with classic sites, but it doesn't seem to be described on the support.google site. Anyone know what the reason is?
tyingq 1353 days ago [-]
Classic sites was based on Jotspot, which they acquired in 2006. I'm pretty sure it was Ruby/Rails at that time.
I suspect sites, at some point, didn't make enough money to maintain a separate team with a skill set that wasn't common at Google.
It take 16 months after the purchase before they relaunched it, though. So perhaps they had already rewritten it in a Google tech stack?
snewman 1353 days ago [-]
Correct. But the Google tech stack evolves, and so the codebase may now be based on obsolete internal technologies.
(Source: worked at Google 2006 - 2010, was very slightly involved in helping the Jotspot team integrate)
rasz 1353 days ago [-]
The main technical problem with them is nobody at Google was ever promoted for ordinary maintenance.
gundmc 1353 days ago [-]
Where did the title come from? "September" doesn't appear once on that entire page. There are a number of dates - August 2020, May 2021, October 2021, December 2021, but the September date seems pulled out of the air.
Could we update to use the original title? "Transition from classic Sites to new Sites"
codyogden 1351 days ago [-]
The standard deprecation notice for G Suite (which includes Google Sites in all its forms) is twelve months from the announcement.
> Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before a Significant Deprecation [1]
A few weeks ago, we activated GSuite for our organization, and from then on could no longer access our Classic Sites. After a long and confusing support chat session, it turns out that our Classic Sites were simply wiped without a warning when we activated our GSuite for the same domain, because of a bug due to some funky deprecation-stuff of Classic Sites.
So yeah, we're pretty pissed that us subscribing to another Google product caused our old stuff to be deleted because of a bug. But it's not that surprising given the rush Google is apparently in to deprecate Classic Sites.
Oh, and I don't think Google's gonna take the time to fix this until the final ditch, so be wary if you still have Classic Sites and are getting GSuite soon!
Also they require £30 payment (well $30 dollars with no other info on how to pay it in any other currency) to allow your org to create YouTube accounts now for some reason otherwise it throws an error. This is a policy decision.
Whole thing feels like an incoherent poorly designed mess.
I use O365 now which actually works properly so fuck ‘em.
You can say this about the majority of Google products. They gain momentum because Google, but under the hood they're crap.
One of the best decisions I made was dropping Google and self-hosting my public-facing services. In this day and age, it's much easier to set up reliable, available services without needing an in-house data center. IMO, it's worth the small extra hosting cost to be the master of your own domain (heh).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah it’s nice that this person is getting help. But what about all the other people who don’t have an audience who can raise their tickets up to this level? Why doesn’t Google support just work the way it’s supposed to work? I’d be willing to celebrate this if it was a rare occurrence but it’s not. It’s way too common. If there are any humans at Google, they sure don’t seem to care about their paying customers.
The flagged parent comment is not talking about the actual problem, and is instead imagining some malicious nature in the googler's comment.
Was that a joke?
The converter theoretically converted the sites, but they went from being a perfectly useful, although basic looking site to looking fucked up and broken.
It’s an anti-feature to do this. It’s sort of free, so I can’t make too much of a complaint.
But it’s a reminder that nothing Google lasts. I just needed a simple list of google docs 10 years ago for a project. The saddest part is remembering how I felt to have that tool available to me back then. I never expected that Google would turn into whatever they are now.
“Organize the world’s information, in a Zip file, in a private cloud folder, making it not useful at all.”
I wish I had thought to save the old URL in the Internet Archive beforehand, but it never occurred to me that Google's conversion process would just destroy it.
Just have to hope people notice before their sites go offline.
The cost would be a rounding error for them.
Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Project? I hope so. That would absolve them to some degree.
I know a company shouldn't be responsible for storing people's content indefinitely but I hate the fact that human culture has become so transient.
In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on.
In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost.
I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.
A few things to consider:
- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.
- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution.
- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.
That ship has sailed. Google's reputation for instability can't get any worse. At this point, it would take a complete 180° and a good 5-10 years of angelic behavior from Google for me to even consider relying on them in any capacity.
i stll giggle at my ignorance thinking they wouldnt do youtube and search.
i really mis search, it was such a nice product. Now it is so bad that internet natives who could slap together a website in 20 min dont understand when i ask them why they have no website of their own. "you mean like a resume?"
they are right of course. no one would ever find it.
Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard.
There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring?
Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements?
You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.
This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work.
Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?
“””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
Fixed. I have no use for Google any more.
They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless.
If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.
If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."
In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.
It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
Turning off a web server on its own isn't removing web history
When Google targets sites that are least likely to have a backup anywhere else, least likely to have active admins, least likely for an admin to notice an email notification in an old inbox, I'm pretty sure that's deleting web history.
Huh, must have been about something else.
There's your problem
We’re going to lose a valuable source of old data if former admins don’t show up, do the work, and rehost
They only gave me a "converted site" in my gdrive when I downloaded from the migration manager.
thanks for the AMA-like availability, really appreciate it.
One question from me: how would you pitch "new Sites" for a potential new customer willing to use it, but afraid his/her/their content might not last the next "modernization" sweep?
In other words: would you try to sell new Sites to a customer that values - and worries about - long term visibility of his/her/their content? If no: what is new Sites' value proposition, in terms of target market?
Thanks again.
Why do you (your team) really have do do this?
This is digital destruction. It's not about the features you shipped in 2008, and what those look like to a 2020 audience. It's about the content(!) which is part of the human creative endeavour.
Thanks for taking questions.
That being said, I hear the feedback, and I'll talk to the team about what we might be able to do, within legal and privacy constraints, to protect published sites.
Whether or not a site has had visitors recently isn't a fair measure of the importance of those sites -- for instance, there were examples of digital shrines in GeoCities and Yahoo still decided to eradicate them all. It was only thanks to projects like the Internet Archive that we haven't lost that period of internet history just to free up some disk platter space.
EDIT: I also am struggling to understand what this means:
> To me, archiving those sites doesn't feel like destruction, it feels like backing up unused content and protecting it for the user.
What does "archiving" mean here? Will the sites still be accessible or not? Is "archive" here a euphemism for "delete" -- in which case, how is it not like destruction and how is it like a "backup"? I'm not sure most people would consider "rm -rf" to be a backup strategy, but it definitely does have very good storage density.
My concern isn’t that the files don’t exist any more,I think it’s nice to zip it and add it to the owners gdrive, my concern is that the files are no longer accessible on the web. So all the links are broken, no longer in search, etc.
This seems like a much larger issue than archiving and it would be cool to hear how you all decided to take the sites offline.
Is it a cost issue? I imagine hosting a billion static sites shouldn’t cost much.
I'm having a hard time understanding why that would justify deleting that information forever. If anything, that suggests that providing static access would be enough and nearly zero-cost. Storage costs are a fraction of what they were.
I do a lot of searching for computer-related historical information, e.g., looking for rationales of "why something happened". Once information is destroyed it's often impossible to recover. No one might look at it for 30 years, and then there's only one retrieval but it was an important retrieval.
We've had a tremendous loss of recent information. This isn't the only example, but it's an important one. I'd like to see information retained, not lost.
I had forgotten about my Google site until seeing this posted. The last update of any kind was early 2013; most content was from 2011 or earlier. Some of the information on the site is wrong, a lot irrelevant, and worst of all, someone might not find my real site because of that one. I'd much prefer a dead site stop working to leaving it out there.
I mean.. if I don’t use my Facebook account anymore I wouldn’t expect Facebook to delete everyone else’s profile?
Yet when I visited the Classic Sites Manager it shows nothing. ("0 owned by you" and 0s all the way down the rest of the suggested filters.)
False positive, maybe? The email sounded like y'all were pretty certain: "We’ve identified that you own one or more ACTIVE classic Sites."
I tried the conversion tool on a dummy site and it opened a Google doc. I am not sure how an HTML page with embedded Google form with a script will be converted to new Sites.
UPD: I assume Google Sites has lots of customers (we were one of them)
Every page in the zip backup, no matter how simple, is around 59K because of all the Javascript Google wraps around simple text. My plan is to convert everything to some flavor of Markdown, but parsing this mess is not going to be exactly easy.
I appreciate that the goal of this backup was to allow me to host it "as is" somewhere else - with no possibility to edit it, which seems rather useless.
What would be really nice is to also get a zip file with some simple Markdown pages that include user editing (font sizes, bolding, etc), without everything being wrapped in Google's Javascript.
We first announced this gradual plan in 2017, with an update in 2019, and now we're providing the detailed plan. The goal was to provide adequate notice for people to figure out whether migration, export, or deletion of their classic sites makes the most sense.
EDIT: to the multiple people that are highlighting that 12 years is not a long time, I should clarify. I agree that 12 years in Internet time is not a long time, but it is a very long time in "how websites work" time.
One of the big challenges in the website builder space, something that Google. Wix, Squarespace, have all dealt with - is that when a user publishes a website, there's an expectation around the fidelity and look-and-feel of that website. The data model and architecture for how you represent a rendered page, how you render embedded content, all are very dependent on how browsers work at that time, and the maintenance of those things can become very challenging.
There was a big shift about ~7 years ago, moving away from a "pixel perfect" layout/raw html approach (Wix, Old wordpress, SQSP 5, Classic Sites), to one where there's some sort of grid-and-box approach where the render is responsive, there's reflow, there's padding and spacing and styling relative to the browser experience. It separates out content from layout to a certain degree in a way that is much more future-proofed and modern. This is how Wix ADI, Squarespace 6+, Wordpress Gutenberg, and new Sites work.
For all of those transitions, there was a platform shift, that required a complete rework of how the system works. My point about "12 years" was that the model of how classic Sites works is 12 years old, and new Sites was intended to match the modern way of how websites are built and delivered.
In this particular case, with Google Sites, maybe the decision was totally justified, I don't know. But, as a general trend across the technology industry, this type of explanation really bothers me, and I think it speaks to a serious mindset problem.
The fact that X is old and Y is new is not a reason to replace X with Y. Hammers are old, but they're also exceedingly useful tools. Users are familiar with how hammers work, and companies have become good at manufacturing them.
The question should be whether the new tool is better than the old one, and if it is, whether it's so much better that forcing every user to re-learn the new tool will be worth their while. And even then, it's worth asking why some of the largest companies in the world can't let both tools coexist, perhaps with the older one kept semi-hidden to avoid confusing new users.
Anyway, sorry for picking on you, I appreciate your willingness to pop into a somewhat-hostile thread. :)
A website maintained with raw HTML still works just fine on modern web browsers. In fact, it works much better. Web pages built with some CMS systems often take 5-20 seconds to load, while the "raw HTML" sites load in fractions of a second. In fact, the speedups continue; JavaScript parsing is slow, while HTML parsing is fast, and HTML compresses like magic. So a "big" HTML file is transferred and displayed in remarkably fast time.
I wouldn't use raw HTML in all cases, but I also wouldn't use a fancy CMS in all cases.
It's okay to use different platforms for different purposes.
This mobilification is a fad, and like many fads it will, too, disappear and have to be replaced (requiring many work hours) because ultimately it’s less usable especially for largely static content. There’s no option to keep a similar look and feel. “Mobile first” has been forced upon us and is now, with reflow, “mobile only.” Imagine if Arxiv required PDFs to be replaced by mobilified versions? So annoying and impractical.
Really disappointed. Google made a bunch of work for themselves just to reduce the usability of older web pages.
Google's misson is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Dropping sites on the cutting room floor because information in them isn't in a convenient format does not make that information accessible or useful.
Anything I can say would only detract from this.
This is modern Google.
Also RHEL support lifecycles are 11+ years, so for RHEL 8 released in 2019, that's a commitment to ~2030 right here and there & with doing this for many years for the past releases proving the point.
No wonder the most critical stuff (Bank, Stock exchnages, etc.) run on RHEL and not on some half baked Google stuff that will get deprecated from under them at a moments notice.
What should have happened is to turn Classic Sites (and new Sites) itself into Squarespace competitor.
I just see this as a massive failure of vision and execution.
Why didn’t they improve classic sites and added yet another product called Sites? May be I am seeing some internal politics surface as fragmentation of product line.
To your Squarespace comparison, Squarespace went through a similar transition - Squarespace 5 worked very similar to Classic Sites, and was replaced with Squarespace 6, which was a complete end-to-end rewrite.
Also, people have technical knowledge here, even if they've never been hired by someone as "the best of the best," or having graduated from a top 10 CS school, so handwaving "fundamentally works differently" is not actually likely to be the enlightening description you might hope it would be.
Huh? Did that 10 years ago. Perhaps we have a different definition of a "classic site".
To me a "classic site" is another name for a static site, that is, a website where the HTML to be served is pregenerated. Static sites are now coming back, not going away. But I always assumed that a website should reflow.
Perhaps when you say "classic site" you mean "site that assumes that all users have the same display size". I agree that such classic sites are nonsense today. But they were always nonsense. At no time was there a guarantee of any particular screen size for HTML, and it's always been easy to write HTML that just reflows. If you do that, your site works just fine.
GP didn't say “classic site” they said “classic sites website”. You seem to be interpreting that as intended to be a somewhat redundant and mispunctuated rendering of “classic site’s website”, but given that the context is a discussion for the shutdown of Google’s classic Sites in favor of only supporting Google’s new Sites mode, I think that it's just a capitalization-omitted rendering of “classic Sites website”, that is, a website using classic Google Sites as opposed to new Google Sites.
Could have called it Classic Sites 2.
My belief has always been "no". Google could kill off the entirety of GMail tomorrow, and I'd be disappointed, but totally understanding.
I know others have done this, but if Google built it and tied it into their Maps product and then ads it would theoretically make it extremely easy for a local barber to control it all in Google and Google would see incremental ad spend.
Instead Sites has been ignored, Blogger has languished, and Squarespace and WordPress are now the defacto tools for SMBs.
Kind of a head scratcher.
I might even use the new version for however long it lasts.
I suspect sites, at some point, didn't make enough money to maintain a separate team with a skill set that wasn't common at Google.
It take 16 months after the purchase before they relaunched it, though. So perhaps they had already rewritten it in a Google tech stack?
(Source: worked at Google 2006 - 2010, was very slightly involved in helping the Jotspot team integrate)
Could we update to use the original title? "Transition from classic Sites to new Sites"
> Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before a Significant Deprecation [1]
1. https://gsuite.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html