In announcing the news, Google Senior Vice Leader Alan Eustace called it a "fall spring-cleaning. " Since taking over as leader in January, Page has moved to streamline Google's operations, pulling back from niche businesses to be able to focus on the biggest bets. Eustace wrote that the new cuts reveal that strategy.
"This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the entire Google experience, " Eustace wrote. "It will also mean we can commit more resources to high-impact products. "
And Eustace said that all from the employees working on the closing businesses will be moved to other Search engines posts.
Some of the businesses that are closing came from acquisitions, such as Aardvark, the social search engine that Google acquired in 2010 for the reported $50 million, and Google Web Security, which was part of the actual Postini acquisition in 2007.
Other businesses shutting down were once launched along with great fanfare. Google's Marissa Mayer debuted Fast Flip, a service that let user read Webpages of magazines and newspapers as though they were flipping through analog duplicates, at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009. And when the company launched Search engines Desktop, a PC application that let users search for files and documents on the computers, in 2004, it was hailed for providing zippier search than the feature native to Or windows 7.
Google is also closing Google Pack, a collection of software tools readily available for download; Google Image Labeler, a game that got users to label pictures to improve the caliber of Google's image search results; and Google Notebook, which let users combine clipped URLs on the internet and personal notes into documents.
The company is also closing Sidewiki, which let people discuss Web content; Subscribed Links, which let users create specialized search results which were added to the normal Google search results on some queries for their own subscribers; and Google Maps API for Flash, which was created to give ActionScript developers a method to integrate Google Maps into their applications.
Those businesses join an already long listing of Google operations that have closed shop in the Page era. In 06, Google announced plans to close its Google Health and Google PowerMeter Providers, as well as Google Labs. And just last week, Google closed the photo-sharing service Photovine merely a week after launching it.
