Goodbye Knol, Friend Connect, Wave, Gears & More

Nov 23, 2011 - 8:54 am 8 by
Filed Under Google News

Google KillerGoogle announced more "spring cleaning" where they are killing off more of the products.

Most of you know they killed off Google Search Timeline a couple weeks ago, but now they told the world.

We're removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the "ngram viewer" in Google Books offers similar information.

Others going away include:

  • Google Bookmarks Lists
  • Google Friend Connect
  • Google Gears
  • Google Wave
  • Knol
  • Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE

For more details see the Google blog for dates and such.

A Hacker News thread has a Google responding to some criticism about this:

The false assumption here is that Google is only a software company. Any company with lots of machines is at least in part a power management / hardware company, and in the field of datacenters, Google is likely the best in the world. They put a lot of engineering into getting heat from point A to point B.

Forum discussion at Hacker News.

 

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