Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search “lemur” and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I’m still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written “monkey” but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn’t mind that so much.
Also, “cat on skateboard” has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where’s my skateboarding cat??
Google’s search products are designed to NOT serve your desired search result. It will serve the most profitable result, FOR THEM, that is at least tangentially related to your search… Maybe. You’ll likely click on one or you’ll try a second search and engage with them more. Google profits, you lose.
Google is a restaurant, the only restaurant that most know of. They have a surplus of hot dogs, but they used to serve hamburgers. You have a reasonable expectation that they’ll have hamburgers. You order a hamburger and you get an hot dog with cotton candy on it. No refunds. You can try to order another hamburger, but the next could be a hamburger or a balloon filled with toilet water. Most will just eat the hot dog unfortunately. Reinforcement, they will continue.
That is a good point, they’ve crammed ai slop into everything yet they can’t even fix something basic as image search.
If google got rid of it you can bet there is sone slop shit coming to replace it
Instead of searching for existing gifs, Google will now pipe your search terms to Gemini so it will generate a gif for you.
We all love to rag on Google, but this is such a nonsense website. Most of the things “killed” there are superseded by another product, like AI studio replacing Firebase Studio and Google TV replacing Chromecast. Then there’s stuff nobody’s ever heard of just to pad the list.
RIP Google Play Music. Have yet to find another streaming service who’s algorithm knew me so well to discover new music
there were two things i loved. one i think was called turntable, which let you and friends take turns DJing. you’d queue up a song and then after your 2 or 3 or idk i usually used it with the same group friends got their plays in, you got yours. i don’t know what happened to it as we stopped using it.
then was thesixtyone, which had great artist discovery. but they were not the best about getting licenses and lost their eventual IP lawsuit. after that they kind of turned into spotify. i’ve just been using my private collection since then.
That one doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Still mourning Google Reader, luckily we can find consolation i in that all those apps and services weren’t strategically killed by an evil corporation.
Tenor was quick, great, and optimal solution. I liked it.
Google (Tenor) notified API Users around five months before June 30, 2026, the access restriction date:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628926Klipy is being offered as a direct alternative:
- https://klipy.com/migrateDiscord also migrated to Klipy about a month ago. Yesterday, I saw positive feedback in communities about Klipy’s more accurate search.
Worth noting that while Klipy is headed up by ex Tenor employees, Google has also heavily invested in Klipy.
At my community (The Gamers’ Tavern) we ditched Discord (when all the age verification crap started) in favour of Discourse and Fluxer (Discord clone, but open source and self hostable) and currently Klipy integration is offering a sketchy and vague pricing model that is looking like it is going to include ads.
So, that’s the vein that runs through all of this. Google killed Tenor, funded a new startup that’ll eventually likely be somewhere they can of course shove ads into.
Thanks for the (more insider than i’ve got) information! I don’t know anyone at tenor or klipy. shit, i didn’t even know klipy existed.
Thank you very much for more insightful information! Google has always been a changer, not a talker, and appreciate them!
Yet, may I ask why did you choose Fluxer over Stoat, and if the source of Google investing in it available?Source: Klipy themselves.
Why Fluxer over Stoat, there is a lot to unpack here, but self hosting was much more mature and well thought out with Fluxer. Docker support was way beyond Stoat, and development is proceeding at a much better rate with mobile apps, integrations etc. We probably answer a lot of the questions here: https://blog.gamerstavern.online/innkeeper/about-community-and-communities
Roger that. Thank you very much for the response and references!
I wish you safety, stability, and peace!
Tenor was always slow for me and had shit search.
I didn’t know it was owned by Google, but now that I do it makes complete sense.
May I ask what sense the “bad search” does in the scope of one of the most common and known advertisement business backed by their fundamentally crucial systems for search, statistics, and analytics?
I read your questions three times but I still can’t tell what you’re asking.
The real problem was probably that Tenor was free, and Google didn’t see a way it could make money from a GIF API.
The author can’t figure out how a company can monetise an API? Monetisation clearly isn’t the problem here. It’s possible that they’re going to launch a new product incorporating this, or more likely incorporate it into Gemini.
On March 27, 2018, Tenor was acquired by Google. The company has continued to operate as a standalone brand.
Huh, well if you couldn’t see a way to make money with it, maybe you shouldn’t have bought it…
You just aren’t privy to the reason why they bought it.
i’m sure that the site’s acquisition was always about user tracking data and never about it being ‘profitable’ itself.
I covered this in this comment here: https://lemmy.world/comment/24536634
Google basically shuttered Tenor and heavily funded the replacement, which is showing sketchy early signs of ads.
Discord needs to offer a setting that you can pick which gif hosting website you want to search. GIPHY results are fucking ass cheeks.
I’m literally just keeping a browser open with tenor and manually copying the gifs over to discord.
I wish it would at least let me switch from GIPHY search to anything else.
