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17 Google products that bombed, died or disappearedhttps://www.businessinsider.in/17-google-products-that-bombed-died-or-disappeared/google-answers-was-the-first-project-google-worked-on-and-started-as-an-idea-from-larry-page-answers-lasted-for-more-than-four-years-but-stopped-accepting-questions-in-2006-/slidelist/54072022.cms2021-07-26T12:44:51+05:30

17 Google products that bombed, died or disappeared

Jul 26, 2021, 12:44 IST

Google Answers was the first project Google worked on and started as an idea from Larry Page. Answers lasted for more than four years but stopped accepting questions in 2006.

Lively, Google's virtual worlds, only lasted a little over a year. Google said it created Lively because it "wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways," but it just didn't catch on. Lively was shut down in 2008.

Google first unveiled Glass in dramatic fashion in 2012, but the device never made it to the masses. Glass came with a high price tag, software issues, potential privacy problems, and generally looked too nerdy. Google ended consumer sales of Glass in January 2015, but it continues to sell the device to businesses and is working on a new version.

Google Buzz was a social networking service that was integrated into Gmail, but it was plagued with problematic privacy issues and never caught on. The company announced in October 2011 it would shut down the service to focus on Google+ instead.

The Google Play edition Android phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. But by January 2015, they were listed as "no longer available for sale" and a Galaxy S5 edition of the phone never materialized, despite leaked photos appearing online.

Google Wave was designed to let people message each other and edit documents together, but users were confused by it and it quickly flopped. Wave lasted about a year before it was killed in August 2010.

Google Video was Google's own video streaming service, launched before the company bought YouTube in 2006. Google Video stopped accepting new uploads in 2009, but Video and Youtube coexisted until August 2012 when Google shut down Video for good.

Google's Nexus Q, a streaming media player that was designed to connect all home devices, was unveiled with great fanfare at the company's 2012 developer conference. Reviews of the $299 Q in tech blogs were brutal, and Google shelved the product before it ever went for sale to the general public.

Google X, an alternative interface for the search engine, lasted exactly one day before Google pulled the plug. A strange tribute to Mac OS X's dock, the site said "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you." Google X was quickly taken offline on March 16, 2005, and today, the name has been repurposed as Google's research division.

Originally intended to give people access to health and wellness information, Google Health was closed for good in January 2012 after Google observed the service was "not having the broad impact that we hoped it would."

Google Reader was a news reading app that let users pull in stories from blogs or news sites. Google announced it was shutting down Reader in March 2013 — much to users' dismay and outrage — and it was officially killed in July 2013.

Google Catalogs, an interactive shopping program that digitized catalogs, was shut down in 2015. Google shuttered the mobile version of Catalogs in 2013 and shut down the desktop version two years later.

Google Hangouts On Air — Google's live-streaming service — is moving to YouTube Live beginning September 2016. The service was originally created in 2012 when live-streaming was catching on and was once used by President Obama and Pope Francis.

Dodgeball, a service that let users check in at locations, was purchased by Google in 2005. Its founders, which included Dennis Crowley, left Google seemingly on bad terms in 2007 and Crowley went on to build a very similar service, Foursquare, two years later.

iGoogle, a personalized homepage, was shut down in 2013. Created in 2005, iGoogle allowed users to customize their homepage with widgets. Google said iGoogle wasn't needed as much anymore since apps could run on Chrome and Android.

Orkut was once a popular social networking service that grew out of a Googler's "20% time" project. The site was more popular abroad than it was in the US and Google decided to kill it in September 2014.

Google Notebook was a precursor to Google Docs and was a place to copy and paste URLs or write notes that could be shared or published. Google stopped development on Notebook in 2009 and officially shut it down in July 2012, transferring all data from Notebook to Google Docs.

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