Google has continued its trending removal of services with Google Sets bidding goodbye on September 5. Google has in the last few months removed quite a few services, some had gained real fame while some missed out on the limelight. On an overall thought, it has been a ‘not so great’ outing for the tech world as Google removed many services, Facebook had ‘Facebook Deals’ withdrawn and Steve Jobs quitting as the CEO of Apple. But of all, Google has been heartening to remove so many services on a one-by-one basis.
Google Sets removal was not a great news, but one could have expected it top come soon. The reason being that that it is a Google Labs project. Google’s decision to shut down its Labs project experiments have given many services like Google Sets a beating for being a Lab project.
Google Sets, like many Lab projects was good but could not make it really big. Many know its name only when its being shut down. Whenever one navigates to the official Google Sets page, a user gets a list of five blank bullet points. One would have to have a number of related offices filled in the boxes. Once its done, Google would take up the task of converting the pieces of information to either a small or a large set of corresponding objects. In short, Google Sets would help a user in finding relationships in the items which have been listed and come up with an expansion for it.
Google Sets had been of help in creating the technological tone for Google Squared, another Lab project which was quite similar to the former. However, Google Squared will also be shown the door on September 5, as it has been noted. In it, one has to type in a category on which they require information. Once the category is entered, Google delivers a page which characterizes the search term and comes up with an automatically generated table. These modifiers and characteristics relate to the original search term. If for example, cat, is entered by a user, the result would show a list of cat species fills a column on the left-hand side of the page while the right hand side would have description, images, and other selectable traits filled in the columns.
Talking about the functionality of these two similar services, Google Sets and Google Squared, it is worthy to note that there has been no detailing as to will these services make it into the other applications of Google or no. Google search, then might not have an inclusion of these services which can be helpful at times. The confusion over this matter looks to settle down as the Google Blog write-up has no eulogy for the dying services.
Google Labs, as an official post saw itself in the Google Blog a month back when senior vice president for research and systems infrastructure, Bill Coughran officially announced the death of the project on the whole. Coughran had written, “While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead”.