
The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died - naeemnur
https://gcemetery.co/
======
jansan
Remember Google Code Search? That was a great feature of Google search. You
could search for swear words in all the code available worldwide. In one (Sun
Microsystems?) code there was a comment "The user is a wanker. He cannot
remember his password." The old days were much more fun.

~~~
0x00000000
Don't remind me of how awful GitHub search is.

I guess code search is just too niche with no marketability to ever improve

~~~
aj7
GitHub search? Try nytimes.com search.

~~~
CM30
Try the search feature in many CMS systems. Those tend to really suck, with
WordPress' being awkward enough that a whole ecosystem of plugins cropped up
to replace it.

There's also at least one version of the OpenCart admin search which was
designed so poorly that it didn't actually search based on whether the term
was anywhere in the page title/content, but whether the title started with the
search term (I think they'd screwed up the MySQL syntax). That was
interesting.

Either way, search on a system not designed as a search engine is usually okay
at best, absolutely terrible at worst.

------
the_duke
I know we bash Google for discontinuing services here a lot.

I definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader.

But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and
age of Google.

~~~
ppeetteerr
I don't think this list is complete. Inbox is not here, and neither are the
multitude of Android apps that Google kept rolling out and discontinuing (e.g.
Allo).

~~~
Thaxll
But Inbox got integrated into Gmail.

~~~
Wonnk13
Gmail doesn't have feature parity with Inbox. We're losing bundles among other
things :(

~~~
crazysim
I really miss reminders mired with emails. Ugh.

------
chiefalchemist
re: Google Wave

"why dead? - Google Wave was discontinued because there just weren’t enough
active users. The IP was later transferred to Apache when the development was
discontinued."

Kinda. But more accurately, there weren't enough active users because Google
__completely__ botched the beta. In restricting the invites then prevented
already establish groups for trying it. For example, if you have a group of 4
or 5 and not as many invites, it was no go.

Keep in mind, Wave was pre-Slack. The market was there. It was primed. It was
waiting for something smart and collaborative. Yet Google did the one thing
you don't want to do with a team-centric tool...intentionally leave out at
least one team member.

~~~
glup
I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew
shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed
from Slack... wasn’t it pretty similar?

~~~
ajmurmann
I'm kinda shocked by the comments referring to Slack. Wave was very different
from any other chat platform. You could edit everything, add different media
elements to the document/channel and keep commenting everywhere on everything.
Slack to me is really just another chat software. I see very little difference
between it, campfire or Hipchat and honestly for the life of me don't
understand why everyone transitioned from Campfire to Hipchat and now to
Slack.

~~~
xtracto
Yeah, although I use and enjoy Slack at work, I see it as a watered down
version of IRC.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Why does slack feel watered down?

------
m12k
Neat! Maybe you could add a line or two to describe what each product was? For
example I'd never heard about Sidewiki, Google Jaiku or Google Catalogs. It
seems fitting that a tombstone would mention not just the date of death but
also a bit about who they were and what they did.

~~~
codyogden
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- Mini-obits
galore.

~~~
joshuamorton
This list annoys me. Reading it, some of those still exist, many we're just
folded into other services, and a couple appear to have been 20% projects that
were never Google's to kill.

------
princetman
Even after 5+ years, I still miss Google Reader almost everyday. Just pure
simplicity and tight community around sharing is yet to be matched IMO. Web
has moved on and as someone commented here, it’s walled garden everywhere now.

Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long
as you did!

~~~
tannhaeuser
I think you're misunderstanding why Google has been criticized wrt Reader. The
problem was that Google first ruined the RSS ecosystem, then pulled out of it
and tried to lead users elsewhere, leaving torched earth behind.

~~~
ac29
How did Google "ruin" the RSS ecosystem? Something like 95% of the sites I
have interest in following have perfectly fine RSS feeds.

------
russfink
What about Google Sets? It was on their Labs page until about 2010. Sets let
you type in some words, and then it would return additional words that fit
with the previous words. Now there is a Google Sheets feature that does it,
but I liked the idea of a stand alone page.

~~~
aleem
It no longer exists in sheets either. Definitely miss this.

------
asaph
> In October 2018, Google announced that it was shutting down Google+ for
> consumers, citing low user engagement and a software error.

I wouldn't characterize it as a "software error". It was a security
vulnerability.[0]

[0] [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-
security/project-s...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-
security/project-strobe/)

~~~
ehsankia
I also don't know if it should be on the list since it hasn't shut down yet.
There's a 10 month sunset period. By that same logic it should include Inbox,
which it doesn't, because that's also in a sunset period.

EDIT: Also, only the consumer side is shutting down. G+ for G-Suite will still
exist.

------
h4l0
Google Spaces lived for so short, it is not included in the list and so far
nobody has mentioned it in the comments. It was a product that me and my
friends have long thought of. I think if it were implemented in a way that
focused on chat but not on shared links, it could have been a success. I still
believe that niche future will find its way into a popular chat application.

~~~
codyogden
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- It's on the list.
:) Only lived nine months. :(

------
codyogden
Oo..cool! I crowdsourced a lot of lesser known products over at
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com). I'll be pruning the
list this weekend to combine/remove some of the phone/device additions that
were added by others during Hacktoberfest.

------
Animats
Looking at this list, it makes you realize that basing your business on a
lesser Google product is a major business risk. Consider Spatial OS.[1] This
is a new back end for persistent massively multiplayer games. It's a product
from a Google "partner", funded by $500M of VC money. It's only available if
you use Google's "cloud". Technically, it's impressive. It's being used for a
few minor game titles right now.

So if you're a major game developer, should you use this for a long-running
game? The Google connection adds business risk. It probably won't be a major
moneymaker for Google, and there's a good chance they'll drop the offering in
two or three years. Then what? It comes with Google-type terms and conditions,
the usual "Google can do anything they want". Drop the product, raise the
price, cut off your service because you're doing something that competes with
some Google interest, that kind of thing.

[1] [https://improbable.io/games](https://improbable.io/games)

~~~
telltruth
Spatial OS is not Google offering by any means. Google is simply huge investor
in that company and those folks are using GCP as part of investment aggrement.
It’s a dumb move by them but it pays their bills for now.

But you are correct. Taking dependency on Google services like maps, offers,
product search and other APIs have previously bankrupted few folks. Also, as a
user I avoid buying stuff like movies, music, storage space, photo storage etc
because it could just disappear tomorrow.

------
max_sendfeld
How about Google Glass? In all fairness though, quite a few are only dead as
standalone products but have merged into other offerings. Take Google Gears
for example - offline storage, worker threads and other APIs for browsers, all
of which is now part of regular Chrome.

~~~
stewartbutler
Glass is still around and under active development, it just isn't a consumer
product. It is in use by several enterprises, mostly factories and warehouses.

My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon
as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of
interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case
they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they
dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially
intended.

------
NelsonMinar
Aw I'm sad to not see my first Google product on the list: the old SOAP search
API. 2002-2006 RIP. I wrote a bit about it when they shut it down:
[http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html](http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html)

------
asaph
Though not a _product_ per-se, Google Instant Search was a significant enough
feature that I think it merits inclusion in the list.

Previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120)

------
jordigh
I hope the Data Liberation Front, while not exactly a "product", lives a long
and prosper life for as long as Google hoards our data:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front)

They were quite helpful in getting about a decade worth of gmail data out of
there when I decided I didn't want to use gmail anymore.

~~~
jankeymeulen
It's required for GDPR so will stay around for a while.

(That's my personal guess at least, not related to that team)

------
nashashmi
Really amazing how many products were merged into Google+ and superceded. And
then also how many products were sunsetted in favor of putting more
development time into Google+.

And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in
features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google
properties.

Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH
move.

------
CodeBytes
Neat idea. What's the criteria? Just it seems to be missing Google Code. Had a
look on Wikipedia and seems to be a lot missing from that too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services)

------
IvyMike
I feel like there should be an honorable mention for Google Groups/Dejanews. I
mean, I guess usenet search is still there, but it's a shadow of its former
usefulness.

~~~
ajmurmann
People keep mentioning Google Groups. I've been using it at everywhere
workplace I can think of, since many years. Most internal mailing lists get
set up via it. Did it use to do more?

~~~
livebsd
Google Groups is horrendous. The mailing list interface works, which is fine.

However the web interface and search results are a true PITA. Waiting for the
page to load just to jump to a random point in the page takes in the order of
5+ seconds on my system.

I remember the first iteration of groups was almost pure html and insanely
fast. Like with most google products, it has been bloated to death.

------
myfonj
What about leaving flowers, like the one on the slate.com from 2013 [0][1]
used to facilitate?

[0] [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-
exi...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-exist-you-
can-even-place-flowers-on-your-deceased-favourites/) [1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html)

------
amachefe
I am still flamoxed by the decision to discontinue GTalk... The build Hangout
and later Allo/Duo

Talk was lightweight, history backups and usable in every platform.

Any startups would love to have Talk

~~~
pasbesoin
Yeah, talk was kind of on its way to being the next AIM. Then, BLAM,
metaphorical bullet between the eyes...

------
michalu
It's missing some services like Google Offers a Groupon competitor:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers)

and Google Reader ... from the top of my head, and some enterprise products if
I am not mistaken

------
bambax
GSA is missing: Google Search Appliance. It was a server you could host on the
company's premises that would index content on your network. It got
discontinued, not sure why.

Maybe the list only includes B2C products.

~~~
dehrmann
I have zero knowledge of GSA specifically, but corporate intranet search is
generally hard, other vendors were already in the space, and the heuristics
and ML that make Google search work as well as it does don't work as well with
less training data and pages without links and anchor text.

------
Doctor_Fegg
Google Map Maker:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker)

------
betandr
Mentioned a couple of times but it's still raw that Inbox has been canned too.
Also the Googlers I know use it and Gmail is some ways back although it has
been improved. It's been the best thing to happen to email forever, IMO, and
I'll really miss it!

~~~
fredley
God yes, I will miss Inbox hard. I have started trying out Spark, and it's
sort of ok but there's really nothing out there with such a tight focus as
Inbox. Gmail on the web is just awful, and perhaps that was one of Inbox's
greatest strengths - it was fast and bloat-free where Gmail is decidedly not.

------
ernsheong
For companies that continue to innovate, product failures and deprecations are
only to be expected. It's not unlike startups that fail for all sorts of
reasons?

I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite,
after all.

------
nolok
I miss surprisingly few of those, notebook and picasa basically. Could have
missed Reader but it was replaced by the theoldreader almost overnight thanks
to advices here (I wasn't a community user but a solo one so I did not miss
the features that may not have been replicated).

I think the bigger issue is the features google removed or modified from some
of its products; like my biggest miss is true verbatim search.

~~~
FlyMoreRockets
Of all the things Google has killed, I really miss Notebook. It was nimble and
lightweight, while Docs is bloated and drags my old machine down (not to
mention my crappy internet connection).

Around 2001, Google had a nifty toll free phone service, kind of like 411, but
better. You it was an early voice recognition system that would even connect
your call to the business you were trying to find. I think it was called
Jupiter, but a cursory search doesn't turn up anything. I miss that too.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Goog-411 was awesome in the days before smartphones.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411)

------
chrissnell
Let's not forget [http://google.com/bsd](http://google.com/bsd) and
[http://google.com/linux](http://google.com/linux)

Search engines for BSD and Linux topics in the earliest days of Google. These
were very popular with the Slashdot crowd, which was probably responsible for
the initial succsss of Google.

~~~
elkos
That brings back some memories

------
vram22
Crazy idea: instead of shutting them down, they should have sold them off to
companies who could run and grow them. Maybe not for $Bs but for $Ms.

~~~
ericabiz
The problem, as I understand it from talking to Google employees, is twofold:

1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that
isn't readily available outside of Google. (They're basically built on a sort
of internal Google "cloud" that has access to code not available outside
Google.)

2) It would cost more money than the product reasonably makes to both move the
product off the Google infrastructure/codebase AND find a team willing to
continue to develop it.

Remember, most of these products didn't really make any money; they were
internal projects that released externally and had fan clubs.

~~~
vram22
Interesting, thanks for explaining.

Not sure, but there seems to be a bit of a contradiction between your point 2)
and the last sentence of your comment.

------
xyphoid
Google bought Bitium slightly more than a year ago. Exactly a year after the
acquisition they notified they were discontinuing service for us - it sounds
like it was a straight acquihire and shutdown for their identity platform.

Migrating our whole corp password management to a new platform right during
the busy time of year has been a nightmare.

------
darren_
A somethingawful YOSPOS person had a similar idea years ago and made
[https://didgoogleshutdown.com/](https://didgoogleshutdown.com/)

(unfortunately it hasn't updated in a while and said SA poster may not have
had the best insight into google product lifetimes)

------
crusso
Google Wave is the one that stands out on that list for me. It was such a
fantastic and ambitious idea, but the execution was so buggy that it was
basically unusable.

~~~
danoise
As I understand it, also the multi-user features in Google Docs, Sheets were
salvaged from Wave? If this is the case, there's a pretty big part of the
codebase actually living on...

~~~
hjnilsson
Google docs had multi-user features before Wave. Back when it was called
writely.com even. Some features scattered out onto other Google products
though (like hangouts).

------
karp773
There area still many more Google products which are effectively buried alive
down the level and levels of menus.

I find it puzzling and ironic how difficult it is to find a Google product.
They should have a Google product search somewhere in the apps menu in the
browser.

Also, next to zero marketing.

------
bradleyjg
GWT is, if not dead, at least in a deliberately induced coma. And unlike some
of the other items it wasn’t a consumer product, it was a heavily evangelized
framework that companies and developers invested in and then were left high
and dry.

~~~
stickfigure
GWT users are doing ok. Yeah development is slow compared to when they had a
bazillion engineers working on it during the Wave era... on the other hand,
that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added. In the mean time,
standard browser changes like source maps have really helped over the old days
of browser plugins.

GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run.
That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years
old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but
it's waning as well.

I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers
should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have
much shelf life.

~~~
bradleyjg
> on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added.

People wrote stuff on top of each one of those “overengineered crap” pivots.

It’s nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that’s of little use to
people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat
story has always been terrible because google.

Also it’s was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still
supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund
open source foundation) for more than twenty years.

~~~
stickfigure
That overengineered crap still works? I mean, it was never a necessary part of
gwt. There are a bunch of crappy react patterns you could use and we don't
blame the core libray. Personally I think redux is overdue for a reckoning.

I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new
mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great.

I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The
transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing
missing is a modern widget framework.

I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too
much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop
of JS frameworks.

------
owaislone
Can't help but think how many services were stopped in order to build those
features in G+ which eventually failed as well. At least we got Google Photos
out of it which seems to be a great app. Hope it lives long enough.

------
AndrewKemendo
Tango should definitely be on this list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_\(platform\))

~~~
wartakode
PowerMeter too

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter)

------
squarefoot
To me embracing and extinguishing the wonderful Dejanews, then when everyone
is accustomed to use Google to search for Usenet posts, removing the
discussion search filter from Google search engine counts just like a
milestone in the planned destruction of Usenet. That move to me looks a lot
worse than axing G+ and other services I don't miss at all, because Usenet has
been here long before Google and is not one of their products.

------
goodmachine
Nice. These tombstones need a "more" button where links, discussion, lessons
learned and a proper obituary can be found. Worth noting that the brand (and
ethical vision) have also died and been reborn.

Last thing: it would also be interesting to see if the death rate is
increasing or declining over time: a higher death rate indicates a healthy org
still experimenting.

~~~
thrower123
At least a sentence or two explaining what the service even was. I vaguely
remember most of these, but there are many that don't ring any bells at all.

------
austincheney
Google Wave died because it was a nice hipster idea that never came close to
meeting the basic requirements for a corporate office, which was its primary
audience. While Google completely failed to realize why this was an obvious
and immediate failure Atlassian didn't miss a beat and took all of that
marketshare.

------
Etheryte
Missing from the list are the many, many competing products & services Google
bought and then promptly shut down.

~~~
codyogden
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- Meebo, Sparrow,
Grand Central, Writely, and many more. :(

~~~
mhfs
Oh Sparrow. The only email client I ever really loved.

------
erikig
The Google Products Wikipedia page is also a great resource for this as well
as a history of the missions, founders, acquisitions etc.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products)

------
sytelus
I wonder why sustainance engineering is so hard. We have managed to bring down
devops almost exponentially in terms of headcount per server. We have also
managed to bring down the cost of storage, hosting etc. The only thing I would
have to worry about is patching code for constant stream of security
vulnerabilities and upgrading to new framework/platforms after LTS expires. Is
this the only driving factor for these shutdowns (generally speaking for all
companies)? This could be a good business opportunity for a startup that comes
around and can say “ok, we will take care of your app, keep upgrading and
patching as needed for a small fee.”. More importantly we need better
development methodology that has infinite sustainance as native as everything
test cases.

------
joering2
You should not be worry registering googlecementery.com. You not defaming
company you merely stating facts. You would be protected under 1A. and you
most likely be indexed by google and bing. So if someone is searching for
“google dead projects” it would be easier to find. Just my 2c.

~~~
techsin101
Can you elaborate

------
donatj
Oh man, I forgot about Google 411. I loved that and used it all the time
before I had a smartphone.

------
brownbat
Some of these I don't remember, and a couple I actually thought I was still
using. :)

The Dodgeball saga seems like a good case study:
[https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-
dodgeb...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-dodgeball-
foursquare/)

It's as if Google is simply too big to realize what a good idea is and support
it.

Ads made Google one of the most profitable companies in the world basically
overnight. No one's passion project will ever look good against that measuring
stick.

------
s9w
What about Google Goggles?

~~~
SquareWheel
Which one? The photo app that read QR codes and such, or the Gmail Labs
feature which asked you math questions before letting you send mail?

~~~
s9w
I only know the old android app

------
gowthamgts12
Google Talk is my all time favourite. The UI is cleaner and it just worked
everytime.

Picasso is also a good photo viewer when I was using Windows. It's a shame
really.

------
posi
The upcoming destruction of inbox will be enough to get me off of gmail. I
keep on having google PR people tell me that GMail has all those features. I
try gmail everymonth and everymonth I'm back on inbox in less than a day. I
created [https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU](https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU) but it seems no one
else really cares about the stuff Id o.

~~~
eganist
I'd be more likely to sign the petition on change.org, for what it's worth.

------
jimmaswell
It's unfortunate they made the free edition of sketchup only a web app from
now on. At least you can still get older desktop versions.

~~~
EvanAnderson
SketchUp isn't a Google property anymore. They sold it to Trimble in 2012.

~~~
jimmaswell
Wow, never knew that after using it for years.

------
TheRealPomax
It would be nice if this were orderable by "what year it was released"/"what
year it was shuttered", naeemnur. Would also be good to link to the official
"shut down" notice, which presumably you had to consult to get the date right,
so having a link that people can follow to start their own web trawl would be
quite useful.

------
gsich
I still use Picasa to tag photos with face recognition. Haven't found anything
even remotely better. I hoped for some advancements with the current ML hype.

For hints I would be thankful. Requirements: Must work offline, must store
face information in the picture (XMP). Must work with ~1 TB of pictures.
Digikam unfortunately sucks. Bad face recognotion and bad UI.

------
SergeyDruid
The list is missing Froogle

------
felipelemos
About Google Reader:. "Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader,
stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and they wanted to
focus on fewer products".

I cannot believe it's true. My understanding is with a news aggregator like it
Google cannot control the news feed like it does with Google news.

~~~
romed
That’s not the reason. Vic Gundotra, the mastermind/moron behind Google+ would
not tolerate any other Google properties with social features. Since you could
share feeds and articles on Reader, and because it had followers and comments
and whatnot, it had to be sacrificed on the altar of Google+.

------
andreiursan
I would also add to the list radio ads
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13go...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13google.html)

------
steveharman
And now in act of insanity they plan to shutter Inbox . :-(

Please sign this guy's petition if you don't want it to happen.

[https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill-
inbox](https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill-inbox)

------
sytelus
Is url shortner dead for real? That would be disaster! So many links on web
will turn dead. When I use URL shortner, there is an implicit trust that thing
will exist for very very long time. It’s cheap to run, it’s useful for
analytics. Why this should ever be killed?

~~~
archon810
Yeah, he's totally wrong on that one.

>After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended
destination.

Source: [https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-
goog...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-
shortener.html).

------
creeble
Goo.gl was deprecated in March.

Not that the world was wanting for yet another url-shortener.

------
ledriveby
The cement tiles around Building 17 at Microsoft are actually like a physical
graveyard. So many dead products! The 90's CD-ROM multimedia era generated a
lot of dead-end franchises.

------
qwerty456127
Aardvark was the coolest Q&A system ever, it's loss is a real tragedy, it's
infuriating how Google bought it just to close it. Also Google+ was the best
social network ever.

------
maaaats
Would be cool if it also explained what some of these services were.

------
thrifter
I don't see Songza on the list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza)

I miss that service.

~~~
codyogden
Nice! Thank you for sharing. I'm going to add that to
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

------
charkubi
Ironic there's an option to share the article on Google Plus.

~~~
mcv
It's not dead yet. They're gonna pull the plug next August.

------
texmex20
I'd like to hear what the "lessons learned" were for each of these. And how
did these dead products help shape future products that were perhaps more
successful.

------
croisillon
There are still links named "Picasa" on Google Maps...

------
ashelmire
If this is your site; the reasons only come up when clicking the rather small
images, though it looks like clicking anywhere in the “cards” should do this.
(On mobile).

~~~
nashashmi
I'm seeing it a little differently. Clicking anywhere in the card works.

------
lisper
Would be nice to have a brief description of what each of these dead projects
actually was. I only vaguely remember Aardvark. I've never heard of Dodgeball.

------
Animats
Then there are zombies, like Google Voice and Google Fiber. They're not dead,
but they're in maintenance mode, not being improved or extended.

~~~
miguelmota
from my experience, Google Voice has worked just fine the way it is for many
years and it doesn't necessary need shiny new features. Would be sad if they
discontinued it

~~~
Animats
There was supposed to be a Google Voice API. Never happened.

------
majani
I don't think it's fair to include products that were rebranded and had their
data moved over to the new service e.g Picasa and Urchin

------
corv
Still waiting on the day Google is going to discontinue Google.

Used to love the company and what the people there stood for. Crazy how things
have changed.

------
capkutay
I really loved Google Wave back in 2009/10\. Used it to collab on a college
project and we thought it was buggy but pretty useful.

------
petilon
I would like to see a similar list for Apple. I think Apple's list would be
shorter, because Apple releases fewer products.

~~~
ac29
Depends if you include individual hardware lines - remember Apple has been
around for 20+ years longer than Google. If you include each individual
product, Apple discontinued far more products before Google was even founded
than are on the entire Google list (which is admittedly incomplete):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._products)

------
crazygringo
Google+ is listed as the first item... but it's still around...

It was only discontinued for consumers. It's still part of paid G Suite, it
just focuses on sharing posts and topics _within_ a company now -- something
it's actually pretty good at. [1]

I wouldn't call it a "dead Google product" by any means.

[1]
[https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/)

~~~
your-nanny
I still get g+ feeds. so when is it being discontinued for consumers?

~~~
lostgame
August, AFAIK.

------
tooltalk
Was Diane Greene's Bebop which Google acquired for $380M in 2016, ever
productized? or is it still work-in-progress?

~~~
karp773
Seems like it's become Google Hire
[https://hire.google.com/](https://hire.google.com/) .

------
your-nanny
i wish this site gave a brief summary of each product in addition to info on
its demise. don't know many of them

------
catchmeifyoucan
I liked iGoogle. I thought it was kind of cool. It would've been a great "new
tab" page in Chrome tbh

------
miguelmota
Would also like to see a list of Google services currently on life support;
not yet dead, but struggling to survive

------
moreira
Has it seriously been half a decade since Google Reader died? That’s one of
those “wow time flies” moments for me.

------
mikejb
Slightly (un)related, at Google X they seem to have an interesting way to
select what projects they pursue and which not: Whenever they get an idea
about a project, they try to kill the idea as fast as possible. Astro Teller
talked about this in an interview with Adam Savage:
[https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414](https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414)

------
Jyaif
What annoys me the most is that they have the right ideas (Waves, Helpouts),
but they lack conviction. The most ridicoulous example is when they introduced
wireless charging, then removed it, and then added it back when Apple finally
added it themselves.

They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of
morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for
their money.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Reader __\+ YouTube __\+ Wave === (possible) FB Killer.

Maybe it's because their goto is analytics and "how can monetize this?"
instead of "what do users want? what do they need?"

 __Both of these had a sizable user-base that would have been leveraged, as
opposed to G+ starting from zero.

------
allard
Don't know if it's dead now. It wasn't when Google sold it nine years ago —
Radio Automation.

------
beefman
Now we need one showing all the products killed as soon as the startups that
made them were acquired.

------
Nightshaxx
I love how many products got shutdown and moved into Google+, then google+ got
shut down....

------
flatline
I still miss google desktop. The Windows search indexer has never been
particularly good.

~~~
Multicomp
FWIW I ended up reading a HN recommendation for the void tools search called
"Search Everything" and on an NTFS-formatted drive it is blink-of-an-eye fast.

It goes on every computer along with 7z and Zhorn Caffeine

------
Foobar8568
Didn't Google at one point published or planned to create a CRM solution?

------
deytempo
I might be just tired but I didn’t see google finance stock screener in there

------
mxschumacher
an archive of all the dead code of failed commercial products would be
interesting. Both to study the implementation itself, but also to see the
version history. Lots to learn / reuse I suppose!

------
mir3la
It’s missing Google Inbox which I’m going to miss just as much as Reader

------
philonoist
Does DuckDuckGo have the scope to revive some of these and get an edge?

------
JamesCoyne
The site is not reachable for me. Here is a mirror.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery.co)

------
thearn4
I'm worried that Google Voice will join this list sometime soon

~~~
creeble
Noooooo!

I hope not anyway. They injected some time into in the last year or so. I'd be
curious to know the number of users; it's still free to get a number afaict.

It's probably their least profitable service, I suppose. Maybe they'll start
(!) listening in on conversations and figure out a way to make money there.

------
howard941
If the Cemetery contained zombies it might have housed the old Google News [*]

[https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en](https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en)

------
hardwaresofton
Alternate (likely open) domain name: googlotha (pun on Golgotha).

~~~
bananadonkey
How about `googolgotha`?

Feels easier to pronounce.

------
becga
Cause of death would be nice instead of 'why dead?'

------
ASipos
Don't forget Google X (the original one)!

------
thrower123
Gmail is about due to be put on this list. They have made the web UI unusable
for no good reason, and driven me back to an old-school desktop mail client.

~~~
neysofu
I can't use the new web UI for my life. The HTMl view is great though and
loads very fast.

~~~
iscrewyou
What HTML view?? How do I access it?

------
dwighttk
What percentage are messaging apps?

~~~
mrweasel
It's weird that for a company to desperate to enter the messaging app market,
they have yet to just clone iMessage. There's a ton of people who have come to
depend on iOS, simply because of iMessage.

The best they've been able to come up with is some weird half-backed Android
Messages or SMS Connect, it's not really clear. It's weird that they don't
just take the ideas from iMessage and run with it.

~~~
dwighttk
I think it is because Apple had to twist AT&Ts arm to the breaking point to
make iMessage work that way and then each carrier they added they had to force
the issue again. Verizon turned them down because Apple wasn’t going to let
them install crap and charge 10¢ (Or whatever) per iMessage in addition to
SMS.

Google would have to convince all their hardware partners to do that carrier
arm-twisting themselves and most those companies don’t have any leverage to do
it even if they wanted.

~~~
mrweasel
Interesting, I did not know that. Out side the US market I think not
supporting iMessage would be suicide for the carriers. If iMessage wasn't
supported by one carrier, people would just switch. Maybe it helps that most
carriers here have had unlimited SMS for a fix low fee for almost ten years.

------
fargo
How can we suggest new items?

------
adventured
You could safely add Freebase (by Metaweb) to the list of things Google
killed.

------
mythrwy
Google App inventor? (guess it's still around, got transferred to MIT).

------
tkyjonathan
I miss igoogle...

------
starboy1996
Google Inbox?

~~~
eumenides1
March 2019. So it's in palliative care and has a DNR.

I like Inbox still. I was using gmail like i was using inbox before the
product existed.

Oh well, when you live on the edge, sometimes you get cut. _guitar riff_

~~~
andraskindler
There's still time. I recently forced myself to switch back to GMail, but it's
not the same.

------
danielovichdk
Google is a search engine. That's it.

------
dakics
\+ Panoramio

------
pasbesoin
Wave solved problems I encountered in commercial (large scale corporations)
work.

It could prevent "submarining" of communication into email chains and instant
messaging conversations inaccessible to those not addressed or cc-ed, also
preventing the time-burning, frustrating, and often incomplete "email dive"
someone would have to perform to find and forward all these emails to e.g. a
new team member or another interested party (new manager, legal, possibly even
a third party).

Add people to the project/communications' access list(s), and they not only
gained participation (without eveyone having to remember to add them to the
list of addressees on new emails) but also access to the historical record.

It enabled team-level permissions for both on-boarding and off-boarding of new
parties: New team members, etc -- like above. Note the off-boarding facility,
in that; short of termination, if someone left a project, you (normal PM or
dev lead or whatever roll) could take them off the access lists for the shared
communications and you could all go your separate ways with a clean, definable
and documented break.

And a bunch of stuff that's long since left my immediately accessible,
conscious memory.

(Alternatives I saw did not compare. E.g. "project documentation skeletons"
expanded from Lotus Notes templates, that left ginormous subtrees of "forms"
that were often very sparsely, if at all, completed -- said completion being
entirely, manually dependent upon the individual doing the work. Finding any
bit of information in those was a giant PIA; who knows into which form they
entered it, if at all, and even when they did, it was surrounded by tons of
boilerplate that made it disappear into that "haystack".)

BUT...

They let front end development hang this very Javascript-heavy UI on it that
bogged down "normal" machines, making the end-user experience rather
miserable. That "lag" (to be generous in description), combined with a healthy
dose of "mystery meat" UI.

People hated that. And they stayed away. (If you could even talk them into
giving the beta a try... once they had access to the beta...)

Maybe it ran fine on internal "Core++" or whatever, ueber-motherboard and
maxed RAM Google machines with local hops to the server. But no-one inside
seemed to give it a good hard run in the "real world". Or to worry about said
performance problems, if they did.

Well, I never got invested in it, other than hope and poking at it a bit once
someone gave me access. But I continued to think, for a good long while, that
the end result was a shame.

P.S. This is just my personal, outsider perspective. Maybe I have some things
wrong. But it's the impression I ended up with.

------
mito88
google+ still breathing.

------
starpilot
I don't miss any of these.

------
bananatron
RIP Inbox

------
rustcharm
Orkut’s story had a strange footnote. It was dominated by Brazilian Portuguese
speakers, making other users feel less welcome. That was a tough problem.

------
ryanmarsh
This is why I use AWS.

