20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time.
Effective 20% projects, in my opinion, are projects that add something new to an existing product and whose maintenance costs are low enough to be absorbed by the project's primary contributors. I've been working on Android lint checks recently: it's something that's self-contained, can be done without interfering with my 80% project, and won't make extra work for the project's main maintainers. (It's also open source, so it can't be canceled. Hah!)
It's also worth pointing out that not all 20% projects at Google are going to be visible outside of Google. I spent my first couple quarters at Google working on maintaining the internal Emacs extensions and user-base; most of my time was spent answering questions on the mailing list. This isn't going to result in Google Maps or Gmail, but it is still needs to be done.
If you want to do something with more public impact, I think you should work towards making that idea your 80% project. Get buy-in from your peers, write a design doc or description of the product, and talk to people who work on similar projects. Once you have a team ready to work on the project, a good design, and clear criteria for success, it shouldn't be hard to become a "real" project.
(I've succeeded in doing this for an internal utility I wanted to write. I wrote a design doc, got some feedback from my peers, and asked my manager for a quarter to work on it, and did. Now it exists and has users!)
If you think it is hard you are either doing it wrong, or it's the wrong job for your personality.
It can sometimes be a challenge, but that is the fun part, not the hard part.
However this explains why Google seems so abrasive... they think it's hard!
You're replying to jrockway. Perhaps you could curb your arrogance. Programming is indeed an extremely hard topic filled with compromises and tradeoffs that are often unattractive.
Picking the correct solution that fulfills time, effort, complexity constraints is why some people are paid so well.
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab...
What do you mean by "private site"?
The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers unless you log in. That really sucks.
Looks like Quora gives you the question, and the first answer, but all other answers are Private-Only.
[1] I think that in the beginning they may have really hidden their answers, but were forced to actually show them by Google.
Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important products and prune the rest. It appears Google is now following this advice.
One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.
Load up a cannon full of ideas, fire and see what sticks.
Microsoft were doing it before Google, but the financial-strategic dynamics of those businesses is very similar.
There's a fountain of cash and a series of spaghetti cannons around it blasting away furiously. Almost nothing sticks. But that's OK, because there's just so much money.
This product shutdown is a little surprising, because it makes Google's core product worse and less useful.
Maybe they're confident their current ranking algorithms get rid of all the crap content farm sites now, and as someone else mentioned, this appears to be the case. But I suspect they'll enjoy a resurgence someday. Ugh.
The blocked sites list hasn't worked for like a year now, so if you haven't been seeing experts exchange links, you aren't going to now, either.
I noticed when w3schools starting showing back up last spring or so, but I haven't seen experts exchange in results for a long time (or at least, I've seen them at a low enough volume that I can't recall any now). Now the only somewhat equivalent experience is quora results, as others have said.
besides google reader, most of the cuts have been good or just not important. I always felt like this feature was a reaction to blekko search engine, and not very interesting. curiously i found myself not wanting to block crappy sites like ehow just cuz they might have a good page and would rather just trust google.
Try typing a phone number into google.
Go ahead, try it.
Google has improved in some regards. I recall having to look through 3-4 pages to find a decent result in some queries a few years ago. They're usually on the first or second page now, but there are still these worthless results that end up in the 1-3 spot. That's enough evidence for me that they need expert intervention, not algorithmic guessing.
Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader, labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?