Mountain View, California — Just last month the search engine titan Google announced that it will soon be shutting down many of its services, and already started doing it with the much disgruntled service called Buzz, and on Tuesday, the company announced the third round of its “spring cleaning” effort, as it streamlines operations, axing its would-be Wikipedia rival, Knol, and Wave, a Search Timeline, a real-time collaboration tool and Google Gears, along with a slew of other features in order to build up fewer products with more integrated features across the web.
Since Google CEO Larry Page took the helm this past spring, one of the company’s most visible initiatives he executed was announced plans to close down businesses that did not offer big opportunities in order for Google to focus on the ones that do.
Along the way, these are Aardvark, Google Desktop, Fast Flip, Code Search, Buzz, Jaiku, and even Google Labs — and today, it has announced a new batch of products that will be shut down in the coming months.
The latest round of cuts, according to a post on the Google Blog by the Senior Vice President, Operations and Google Fellow Urs Hölzle, the company is axing the following products and services: Google Wave, Google Gears, Google Friend Connect, Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Search Timeline, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.
“Our objective is to create a simpler, more intuitive, truly appealing Google user experience,” the company explained in its third blog post concerning the sweep.
In fact, these products did not performed the way Google originally anticipated, so the company is now letting them die out, leaving room for more important projects such as Google+, which is starting to see deeper integrations with successful Google products such as YouTube.
Unlike some of the products on this list, Wave, one of the products being pulled down altogether, was a similar product to Google+ in that it allowed you to collaborate with friends and coworkers on a presentation or document.
Touted as an ’email killer’ when it launched in 2009, Google Wave failed to catch on over the course of its first few months, and the company announced plans to terminate the project in August 2010. According to Hölzle’s post, the service will become read-only on January 31, 2012 and will go dark on April 30.
“You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the current PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off,” Hölzle explains. “If you would like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.”
Again, Knol, which was launched in 2007, was another collaboration tool, which Google hoped would improve web content. Similar to Wikipedia, it granted topic “experts” to provide information and insight into that topic, will continue to work until April 30. From May 1 to October 1, articles published on the site by the community, known as knols, will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
Google is winding down its largely unsuccessful Knol site in May. (Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Last month, Google announced that more than 40 million users had signed up for its newly launched Google+. However, if that number continues to shoot up, you can expect to see even more periodic cleanings-out of products and services.
Here is the full list of products being shuttered, which can be viewed on Google’s blog post.