Thegeeknotes.com

Despite of being one of the biggest successful companies in the world, Google Inc has had its share of total failures. In Addition to its flagship search engine, Google has launched dozens of products over the years – many of them are now gone & dead. Lets take a walk through the Google Graveyard.

In another attempt to keep up with Twitter and Facebook, Google launched this special network as an opt-out service for gmail users – many of whom reacted angrily. Can Buzz overcome privacy concerns and slow growth to avoid going the way of Wave?

Google Page Creator was – you guessed it – a tool to help users create web pages, which were hosted on Google’s servers. Google canned the product in 2008 to focus on Google Sites – not the first time it suffered from feature overlap.

Google Notebook was a browser based application that allowed users to cut, paste, share and save texts, links and imaged from the web to a personal “notebook.” This functionality has been replaced by Google Docs.

JAIKU is to Twitter as Dodgeball is to Four square?

Google purchased the microblogging service in 2007; it failed to take off, and google has open-sourced the code and no longer actively develops it.

Google bought Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service in 2005. Its founder went on to leave Google and form Foursquare, now the leader in the location-based space. Dodgeball is no more, but Google has launched a new mobile application, Latitude.

Google hoped Audio Ads, a radio based advertisement platform, would offer the powerful metrics of search based advertising to broadcasters. But measuring performance proved much more difficult, and in 2009 Google left Audio Ads behind.

SearchWiki turned Google Search into a wiki – logged in users could move results up and down or delete results they didn’t like, Searchers can still star a result to mark it as a favorite, but the other wiki options went to the chopping block.

Google Wave was supposed to reinvent email, bringing old-fashioned electronic mail together with new technologies like instant messaging and social media. It launched to huge hype, but users found it overly complicated and failed to ride the wave.

Google’s answers to Yahoo Answers employed paid researchers and asked users to bid for a response to their question. But users, it seems, preffered their information free, even if free means questionable.

Google Video player was a standalone desktop application for playing Google Video files. But it turned out the world didn’t need yet another video player – Google hasn’t fared well at entering a market late unless it offers a clear improvement on existing products.

Google’s downloadable Web Accelerator had some bugsand privacy issues – for example, It prevented users from watching YouTube Videos. Basically it was a proxy server used to reduce web access times via caching technologies. Google axed it in 2008.

Google Catalogs, a search engine for print catalogs, languished in Beta from 2001 until 2009, realizing the uselessness of a product that puts catalogs online, when only people who cant use the internet still use catalogs, put it out of its misery.

Google X was a version of the Google Home page modeled after the Mac OS user interface, The bottom of the page read,

“Roses are red.

Violets are Blue.

OS X rocks,

Homepage to you.”

It’s hard to imagine Google crafting an ode to Apple today, and in fact Google X only survived for one day.