I first stumbled on this site over half a decade ago, and it's nice to see it's still going. There's genuine effort to collaborate with locals to produce curated content - see for example the city showcase of Lagos, Nigeria: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/creative-lagos
I unironically think it's Google's greatest contribution to media in the 2010s.
I agree. I'm still amazed by the quality and depth of the Brazilian content (I'm Brazilian). The page about Portinari's huge "War and Peace" paintings at the UN headquarters is a striking example.
Taken as a whole, the title guidelines feel more focused on titles of articles, rather than whole website titles. I can understand the complaint, but in my opinion this title is fine. The title just feels a little... bare without the note.
You could be right, after reading through the guidelines it does seem on the edge. Which exact policy do you think it is violating?
I was trying to relay that it is an enormous resource by Google but somehow nobody talks about it. (At least I haven't heard about it, which is odd considering its size.)
The title does sound a bit clickbaity, please tell me what title I should have used instead.
I think the typical approach is to use the regular site name (so just "Google Arts and Culture") and let people click on it assuming there's something interesting about it to justifying being posted. That doesn't work super well when the original title is vague, like this one, but I think it does correspond to this guideline:
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
I use this feature in my painting class all the time. The ability to zoom in so close to a painting is incredible. In many ways, it offers a better learning experience for a young painter than seeing the paintings in real life.
Can mostly survive on autopilot, & it's s0o0o0o much easier to shut something down for not having > X0 million users, than it is to shut it down a clear charity case because it doesn't make money. (it's not supposed to!)
After 7 years there, the greatest lesson I walked away with is motivated reasoning really matters.
Very very little at Google survives on autopilot. There’s a constant drumbeat of required changes, whether they be accessibility, regulatory (DMA, hurrah), internally motivated changes (material design++) etc. For anything to survive there must be someone who cares and is willing to invest in it. This is a large part of why stuff gets killed, the default there is for things to die. Yes there are strategy changes too, but very often things die because the person who could champion a thing is no longer there to do so, or has changed roles significantly enough that they can’t plausibly do so anymore.
Seattle’s “nearby” feature lists usual suspects but also the Rubber Chicken museum at Archie McPhee’s, a defunct “Bad Art Museum,” a selfie museum, an NFT museum, a coffee museum…
I’m no fine art snob but this looks like it’s powered by a keyword search result.
The mobile app used to have a feature where you could upload a selfie and it would search for a painting that looked like you. It did a really good job.
Dearest downvoters, I can understand why you did it - the person I was replying to was talking about whether Google’s web app actually has that feature, whereas I misinterpreted them as talking about whether it technically could have that feature. Mea culpa.
Still, I think my reply does demonstrate - there is nothing technically stopping Google from adding this feature to the web version, if they felt sufficiently motivated to do so
I weirdly remember this being announced when I was an undergrad in 2011, and thinking it would get killed super fast like Wave, which was given to Apache in 2010 - amazing it still exists!
Thanks for the reminder, I'd forgotten about this website. My favorite post on there is "Exploring the Ripley Scroll: A recipe for making the Philosopher's Stone" [0]. Now I'm feeling motivated to make a painting inspired by the Ripley Scroll. There's something so whimsical and delightful about it. I really wonder what the creator was thinking when they were making it. I love all these arcane magic systems.
My only advice beyond what others have said would be to try and archive it. Google has show themselves to be anti-consumer unless they benefit, so I expect they will kill this as well.
Also, in case someone wants to give
me crap, If someone gave me traffic numbers and such so that I know what to expect, I would absolutely be willing to mirror this provided I can find it, and unlike Google, for me, fund != profit. If you work at Google and are confused, please just do a search on Duck Duck Go for the Google graveyard and find a sane job after you realize your current job will end soon.
I unironically think it's Google's greatest contribution to media in the 2010s.