Give it up for Product #286: Google kills Google Domains

[HarryNyquist]

Summary

Google is shutting down Google Domains, passing all domains (and their users) to Squarespace.

 

Quotes

Quote

In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” with Squarespace taking over the business and assets. 

 

Squarespace announced today that it “entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business.” This includes “approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.”

 

Google cited “efforts to sharpen our focus” in selling the Google Domains registrar business, which launched in 2014 as a big proponent of HTTPS and top-level domains (TLDs) as of late. The service exited beta in 2022.

 

...

 

More notable today is how Squarespace “will become the exclusive domains provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years.”

 

My thoughts

I mean, what else is there to say? The jokes kinda write themselves with Google killing things off. While I wonder what Squarespace's domain experience is, I'm glad I got onto namecheap when I did.

 

Sources

https://9to5google.com/2023/06/15/google-domains-squarespace/

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[CoveWolf]

Man this really makes me sad! I have had a very good experience with google domains and have used it for months. I am very sad to see it go.

[NF-F12]

I have used Google Domains extensively, in fact my most recent purchase was only days ago...

[shermantanker]

Who do you guys recommend? Don’t really want to mess with squarespace. I also have a few workspace emails I need to keep going.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, CoveWolfYT said:

Man this really makes me sad! I have had a very good experience with google domains and have used it for months. I am very sad to see it go.

The worst part of Death by Google is that when Google does have a good service you like and use, you have to keep in the back of your mind it might just not exist next month.

[CoveWolf]

Yea. I wish google wasn’t like that.

[CoveWolf]

21 minutes ago, shermantanker said:

Who do you guys recommend? Don’t really want to mess with squarespace. I also have a few workspace emails I need to keep going.

 

I used to use hover.com they were pretty good for the most part. I only switched to google domains for the easy integration with google sites

[BachChain]

Damn, they really just created the whole .zip shitshow then immediately dumped the whole thing on someone else.

[WolframaticAlpha]

Wtf, what is google smoking? Why did they sell it? It is such a simple and nice service. Oh, man. This is so stupid.

[Polderviking]

Funny I have to read about this here instead of this beeing relayed to me by Google. You know. On the count of beeing a user of this service.

 

Edit: Even as I log in now there is nothing about this in their domains environment.

[Zodiark1593]

Damn, Google services really do be dropping like flies. 

[soldier_ph]

Squarespace, build it beautiful.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

The worst part of Death by Google is that when Google does have a good service you like and use, you have to keep in the back of your mind it might just not exist next month.

At least they sold it off this time, instead of just banishing it to the memory black hole.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

The worst part of Death by Google is that when Google does have a good service you like and use, you have to keep in the back of your mind it might just not exist next month.

I find the whole "Google kills so many products" meme to be greatly exaggerated. 

If we look at websites like "KilledByGoogle.com" it's easy to glance at the long list and go "wow they sure kill a lot of products", but in a very large portion of cases they are not actually "killing" the product. They are just folding it into another product, or rebranding it. 

Here are some examples that are on the first page of killedbygoogle right now.

 

Grasshopper - Similar things now exist in "Code with Google". No need to offer several programming courses.

Google Street View (standalone app) - Pretty self-explanatory. Street view is now part of Google Maps. There is no need for a standalone app anymore.

Google OnHub - Google now has a different brand of routers. It was literally just two models of routers that were released once, and since then Google has made a bunch of other routers that offer similar functionality but don't have the "onHub" branding.

Google Duo - Functionality has been moved to other apps.

AngularJS was basically just version 1 of what is now called "Angular 2", which is still supported. 

Google Toolbar - Google killed support for that after Microsoft killed support for Internet Explorer.

Chatbase - Functionality was added to Dialogflow. No need to keep a separate program for it.

 

 

The list goes on but I think you get the point. Those were just the ones I knew about on top of my head when quickly scrolling through the list. I am sure there are plenty more cases like that.

Google does sometimes flat-out kill off good products, but it's way less frequent than some people think.

 

 

Anyway, shame that they are handing Google Domains over to SquareSpace. It seems like the service was good and popular.

[Doobeedoo]

Google just social experimenting as usual.

[Retrodude21]

12 hours ago, shermantanker said:

Who do you guys recommend? Don’t really want to mess with squarespace. I also have a few workspace emails I need to keep going.

You could try njalla

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The list goes on but I think you get the point. Those were just the ones I knew about on top of my head when quickly scrolling through the list. I am sure there are plenty more cases like that.

Google does sometimes flat-out kill off good products, but it's way less frequent than some people think.

Do note however not every transition is done smoothly, Google could roll things in to other offerings or something similar but it still can displace existing users who end up treating it as the product getting killed off, because to them and their experience it has been.

[HarryNyquist]

7 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If we look at websites like "KilledByGoogle.com" it's easy to glance at the long list and go "wow they sure kill a lot of products", but in a very large portion of cases they are not actually "killing" the product. They are just folding it into another product, or rebranding it.

The thing is it's a sign of disorganized executive thinking on Google's part. Obviously there are some stuff that the site exaggerates, but I'm still baffled by some of their decisions.

 

e.g., having Google Talk and choosing to create a brand new messenger for Google+ along with Hangouts, killing Google Talk, then killing both Google+ Messenger and Hangouts in favor of Google Chat/Google Meet, then creating Duo for some reason and folding it into Meet. All of these services have entirely different UI/UX as well, despite fulfilling the same niche of software.

 

I'm glad they're streamlining things, but it's going to mean killing/merging more products, and sometimes those mergers or their replacement services are not even close to the thing they killed off.

[Dominik W]

I'm just worried that I will have to pay more.

 

Which I really don't want to do.

[AlTech]

22 hours ago, HarryNyquist said:

Sources

https://9to5google.com/2023/06/15/google-domains-squarespace/

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I hate to be that guy but Google Domains is actually Product #286.

 

Product #287 is Google Album Archive and is due for deletion on July 19th.

[porina]

8 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Product #287 is Google Album Archive and is due for deletion on July 19th.

I just got an e-mail for that, and was like, WFT is Album Archive? Turns out it is what some Picasa data got rolled into. Haven't used it in about 10 years. The rest seems to be absorbed by Photos.

[Drazil100]

On 6/15/2023 at 11:24 PM, CoveWolfYT said:

 

I used to use hover.com they were pretty good for the most part. I only switched to google domains for the easy integration with google sites

I currently use Hover. Haven't checked into it recently to see if anything has changed though so don't take this as a recommendation. I set it up years ago and haven't had a reason to change anything. It's at least an option worth researching. Whatever you do though don't use godaddy...

[Jerakl]

Wild how I use that service and got notified here rather than by google.

[Dominik W]

1 hour ago, Jerakl said:

Wild how I use that service and got notified here rather than by google.

I found out the instant it came out via sheer luck while browsing the internet and stumbling upon the business newswire as soon as it came out lol

[DexterSmythe]

After this news I did some research and decided to move all my domains from Google Domains to Cloudflare. Because I use them for my DNS anyway and because they don't take any cut on domain purchases on their platform.