Google is cleaning house. As part of new chief Larry Page's new product-focused management structure, the search giant said Friday that it will shut down and streamline several of its products in the coming months, including Aardvark and Fast Flip.
"This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience," Google senior vice president Alan Eustace said in a blog post. "It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people."
Most of the products on the chopping block are rather small or have outlived their usefulness in a changing tech landscape. Eustace said employees working on these efforts will be moved to "higher-impact products."
First up is Google Pack, a product Page unveiled at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. It was billed as a quick and easy way to get "essential" software on your PC, including Picasa, Google Desktop, Firefox, and basic anti-virus protection. Eustace said the "rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of Web apps" has prompted the demise of Google Pack, which will shut down, effective today. The Google Pack Web site, however, will still contain direct links to the software it provided.
The focus on Web apps has also signaled the downfall of Google Desktop. "People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline," Eustace said, so Google Desktop will be discontinued as of September 14, as will the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
Integration has also killed Google Web Security, which came about thanks to the 2007 acquitision of Postini. "Since then we've integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome," Eustace wrote. Existing customers will still be supported.
In the social space, Google will also dump Aardvark, a networking site it acquired in February 2010. Aardvark allowed users to ask questions, and the technology would match those inquiries to people with relevant knowledge. Eustace billed that purchase an an experiment in social search, but said Google will "continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world."
Also getting the axe is Fast Flip, a service that displayed screen shots of various new outlets' stories and let users flip through them on the Web and on mobile devices. While "the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web," Google said "this approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools."
Other products Google will retire include:
Google Maps API for Flash: Support for existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash will continue, but Google will focus on the JavaScript Maps API v3.
Image Labeler: Google said the product was intended as a "fun game to help people explore and label the images on the Web."
Notebook: Google Notebook lets people collect URLs and create documents for sharing and publishing. It'll shut down in the coming months, but data will be exported to Google Docs.
Sidewiki: Google will instead focus on "broader social initiatives." The company will provide current Sidewiki authors with details about the shutdown in the coming weeks; Google will provide users with a few months to download their content.
Subscribed Links: With this product, developers could create customized search results that were added to regular search returns. They will stop appearing after September 15.
"We'll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential," Eustace concluded. "But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience."
In July, Google shut down its Google Labs experimental project incubator as part of an effort at "simplifying and streamlining" the company's product lines. For more, see the 10 Great Google Labs Projects That Might Get Axed slideshow below.