Google closes down 10 of its services at once: but don't worry, 'Search' isn't one of them

Google CEO Larry Page: the company has announced a 'spring clean' of 10 of its products

Even gigantic technology companies have to have a 'spring clean' occasionally - but don't expect them to do anything so conventional as wait for spring.
Search giant Google announced via its official blog that it is having an 'autumn spring clean'  - which means, in layman's terms, closing ten of its services at once.
The good news, for those of us hooked on Google searches, or newer services such as Google Mail, or Google Documents, the company's free online rival to Microsoft Word, is that the services to be 'cleaned' really are dusty old techno-rubbish at the back of the cupboard.
'Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t,' said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, via the company's official blog, 'Today we’re having an autumn spring-clean at Google.
'Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features.This will make things much simpler for our users.'
The products destined for the chopping block are certainly not among Google's star performers. Among the 10 is Aardvark, a 'social questioning' service, FastFlip, a news delivery system, and SideWiki, a technology designed to allow internet users to work together as they browsed.
Many of the culled products had started life as start-ups purchased by the Californian tech giant. Others were downloaded software such as Google Desktop - abandoned as the company seeks to move more and more of its services online.
Many of the 'cleansed' services, though, will find new homes as part of Google services such as its new social network Google Plus.
Google's CEO Larry Page, who launched the company in 1998, said in an earlier blog post that the company aimed to focus its efforts this year more closely on its best performers.

SOME OTHER GOOGLE INNOVATIONS THAT DIDN'T QUITE MAKE THE GRADE

Buzz: the company's first attempt at a social network was greeted with fury when the company turned it on without warning, exposing people's 'friend lists' to the world
Wave: Google's Wave was a strange hybrid of web forums, social networks and instant messaging. Most people were left puzzled, and it was the project was quickly abandoned
Orkut: Google actually beat FaceBook to the social-network market with the oddly named Orkut. Orkut was a hit - but only in the Philippines, India and Brazil. It is still active today, but has just 66 million users next to Facebook's 750 million

'It is easy to focus on things we do that are speculative (e.g., driverless cars) but we spend the vast majority of our resources on the core products.
'We may have a few small speculative projects happening at any given time, but we’re not betting the farm on this stuff. All of us at Google want to create services that people across the world use twice a day … just like a toothbrush!'
Since Page resumed his duties as CEO this year, the company has focused increasingly on new products such as its social network Google Plus, a direct rival to FaceBook, but with an emphasis on preserving user privacy, and the option to split contacts into separate groups such as 'Friends' and 'Acquaintances'.
Page's moves have not been without controversy, though: the company's insistence that Google Plus users use their 'real names' created a wave of dissent online. Google has been eclipsed in recent months by FaceBook as the site most Britons spend most of their time on online - and so far, Google Plus has failed to remedy that.