Top Ten Discontinued Google Apps – A Brief Look Back Into Google History

Not suprisingly, Google has more discontinued applications than most companies have in their entire portfolios of products and services.

Even more impressive is the fact that most of them were scrapped because of integration with other Google products, not because they were bad ideas.

My own personal top ten favorite applications discountinued by Google are as follows:

10. Google Answers

Question and answer service, allowing users to pay researchers to answer questions. Google announced the
closing of this service back in November of 2006. All past discussions have been publicly archived.
Certainly not a bad idea. Yahoo and LinkedIn, however, both still have free questions and answsers.

9. Google Catalogs

Search engine for over 6,600 print catalogs, that although discontinued back in January of this year, certainly gave participating sites a humoungous competitive advantage while it was around. Sounds to me like companies would have paid big bucks to keep their entire catalog of products on Google and possibly even more money if integrated with Google Checkout.

8. Google Music Trends

Music ranking of the songs played with iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player and Yahoo Music. Trends were
generated by Google Talk’s “share your music status” feature. Possibly just a case of you can’t be all things to all people, all the time.

7. Google Page Creator

Webpage-publishing program replaced by Google Sites.

6. Related Links

Script that places units for related Web content, including pages, searches and videos, on the owner’s Website, through embedded code. Although discontinued in July 2007, it’s possible that Microsoft Bing’s related links could inspire Google to bring some form of Related Links back from the dead.

5. Google Shared Stuff

A web page sharing system discontinued in March of this year. Too many other social bookmarking sites already around.

4. Google Voice Search

Automated voice system for searching the Web using the telephone. Now called Google Voice Local Search, it’s currently integrated on the Google Mobile web site.

3. Writely

Web-based word processor acquired by Google in 2006 and merged into what is now Google Docs.

2. Jaiku

Mobile micro blogging service that, just on a hunch, could see a rebirth if Google is unable to buy Twitter.

1. Google Notebook

Enabled users to View and add notes. Although there are others in the same space, this is one I’d still be using today if it hadn’t been discontinued in January of this year. My take on Google Notebook is that the reason it was dumped was because it was free and would have had to stay that way.

Check out a complete list of Google previous products on Wikipedia.