I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.<p>Google checkout turned into Google Wallet.
Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul.<p>There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them.<p>Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the idea doesn't work they pivot and drop it.
RIP Google Code Search, aka the best code search ever. No credible competitor has yet emerged, and this is a real loss for all programmers: no more easy searching for sample code in obscure WIN32 Api, easy searching for arch-specific POSIX implementation details used by various open source projects, global error message grepping, and countless other little things which are not incredibly painful and difficult. I am still puzzled that we suffered such a tremendous regression.
I was one of the (apparently few) people who used Google Sets a lot. Even though its results were often hit-or-miss, there were enough hits for it to be a valuable resource.<p>And unfortunately, I don't know of any comparable alternative. (But please tell me if you do!)<p>Here is the problem it solved:<p>It let you discover members of a set by entering a few members that you already know.<p>For instance, if you enter "terrier," "bulldog," "German shepherd," it might return, "beagle," "poodle," "chihuahua."<p>Obviously, in this example, it would probably be just as easy to Google "list dog breeds."<p>But what if you know a few members of a set ... but don't actually know what the set is, or the proper way to describe the set to a search engine?<p>Or what if the search engine results take you to pages that list some related terms, but you've got to sift through a lot of other content to get to them?<p>That's when Google Sets really came in handy.<p>Edit: I admit, Google has gotten a lot better in recent years at returning this sort of information in search results. And Wolfram does a good job, too. So my need for Sets has decreased, but I still miss it.
Remember this before you rely too much on a Google product. Google isn't Microsoft and that's okay, but one of Microsoft's strong points is that they keep things around forever. Google still has the start-up culture where you can throw things away that aren't working. The difference is, in most start-ups, you don't have millions of people using the product you just threw away.
Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.<p>Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.
They forgot Google Code[1]. It's still "up" but it's obvious it's been abandoned by the amount of spam issues that have been building up. I know people like github more than google code - but I personally liked Google Code for it's simplicity.<p>[1] - <a href="https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-id&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Stars%20Owner%20Summary" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...</a>
Google Ride finder • 2007 - 2009<p>Wow...killed the same year Uber was founded. Missed out on a nice market opportunity...probably just needed to be refined, remarketed and keep it going. (I never even heard about it.)
I preferred the Slate Google Graveyard with flowers:
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...</a>
Can't believe nobody mentioned Google Reader yet - that was such a great product and they killed it, still haven't found anything that comes close (and I'm paying for a theoldreader.com subscription, they're good but no Google Reader).
Wow, I've forgotten how many Google products I used that were abandoned at some point. I counted 15 that I've used.<p>To be fair, some of these didn't die - they were renamed, graduated, or folded into another project. Google Talk actually still works on Google Chat if you have the old client. Google Listen became Google Music, Checkout was mostly folded into Wallet, etc.<p>Sidenote: if you are the developer, that yellow-on-white is almost completely unreadable. I know flat pastels are in, but I have to either strain or open the box to highlight.
I always wondered why Google didn't spin off some of this as open source projects.<p>It seems to me that the bottleneck wasn't the hosting, but the man hours being wasted on them. Google could have reduced their involvement to providing an API and the development could have been managed by community.<p>It's easier said than done, obviously. Maybe the bottleneck was psychological and focus related, and they wanted to wipe the slate clean?
How many of these were companies acquired by Google, and then dismantled after the project didn't gain traction?<p>Not bashing Google, but there's always posts on Medium about how some startup got bought by Google, promised they wouldn't change anything and within a few months, simply dropped the project and laid off the employees.
The Google Graveyard
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...</a>
I liked Google Squared a lot and it could have been a great comparison tool. For those who never tried it, you could search for "Ultrabook" for example, and have a table with different models, the screen size, autonomy, price etc ...
Um, Google Videos is on the list? <a href="https://www.google.com/videohp?gws_rd=ssl" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/videohp?gws_rd=ssl</a>
I am still super unhappy about Google removing the "Discussions" filter as a search option over a year later. It was insanely useful. I think you can still do it by adding something to the URL, but the quality of the search filter has dropped drastically (which is maybe why they removed it). I don't know of any other search engines that have a Discussions filter.
This flakiness is really hurting Google's B2B business. Google tends to do things in a particularly proprietary Googly way that locks companies in, but the history of killing off products makes nobody want to commit to that.<p>Thus the B2B offerings underperform, making it more likely they'll get killed off.<p>I follow google reasonably closely and I haven't even heard of a good 40% of these.
Picnik was a Flash based photo filter editor. Can one recommend a Flash/HTML5/WebGL based alternative service?<p>Picnik was best of its kind and IMHO better than Photoshop default filters.<p>Google bought the service, there were plans to add it to Google+ Photos, never saw the great Picnik filters again.