Google Shuts Down Ten Experimental Services

Google has Official Google Blog: A fall spring-clean that it will be shutting down some of its experimental services soon. Some of the services will be integrated with already existing products as features. Google plans to improve its existing products by this move. The following products will be impacted.

Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up acquired by Google 2010. It was a new kind of social search. Studies showed that people were more likely to believe information given by other humans rather than by machines. So Aardvark, allowed people to ask questions and it would distribute the questions to other people according to the topic of the question. You could also add the service to G-talk and thereby ask questions and receive answers right in the G-talk window. I found it to be quite useful and convenient and hope Google incorporates it somewhere else. I guess G+ would be perfect for this feature.

Desktop: This product brought the ease of Google search to your desktop. Google feels that they’ve met the goal of Google Desktop, and hence will discontinue the service on  September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

Notebook: Using Google Notebook you could combine clipped URLs from the web and notes into documents. These Notes could be shared and published. Notebook will be shutdown but all the data will be exported to Google Docs.

Image Labeler: This was started as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the net.

Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007. Google has  integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products

Other products to be discontinued are Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack , Sidewiki and Subscribed Links.