After co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO in April last year, Google began eliminating products that weren’t core to its business or that had become obsolete, unpopular or redundant. More than 30 wares have been zapped.
At the top of this latest wave is Google Mini, which was launched in 2005 as a smaller, less expensive option to the Search Appliance.
The Mini had “a good run,” but its functionality is better provided by other enterprise search products like the Search Appliance and the cloud-hosted applications Site Search and Commerce Search, wrote Matt Eichner, general manager of Global Enterprise Search, in a blog post.
“We will of course continue to provide technical support to Mini customers for the duration of their contracts, and will reach out to them shortly with more details,” he wrote.
Also getting the ax is Google Talk Chatback, which lets Web publishers plant a Google Talk widget on their sites to communicate with their visitors. That product is now “outdated” so it will be turned off and websites are being encouraged to use the Meebo bar instead.
Google Video, which has been closed to uploads since mid-2009, will have its remaining hosted videos transferred to YouTube “later this summer,” and its users will have until Aug. 20 to migrate, delete or download their content.
“We’ll then move all remaining Google Video content to YouTube as private videos that users can access in the YouTube video manager,” Eichner wrote.
In a related blog post, Google said that the Google Video team will be solely focused on video search.
Also going the way of the rotary phone is iGoogle, the company’s personalized home-page portal. Launched in 2005, iGoogle will be closed on Nov. 1, 2013, which gives its users about 16 months “to adjust or export their data.”
“With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time,” he wrote.
Finally, Google will soon be eliminating its Symbian Search App to focus instead on mobile Web search provided via mobile browsers at Google.com.