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It's spring cleaning time at search giant Google. In what the company describes as 'fall spring-clean' it has pulled the plug on as many as ten of its products. In a blog post, the company's senior vice president Alan Eustace wrote, "Over the next few months we'll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features."
The changes to Google's product portfolio were hinted at by chief executive Larry Page during the company's second quarter earnings call. The closures of these ten services follow Google's recent shutting down of applications developed by Slide, a social networking software maker it bought last year, and Google Labs project.
Here's over to the ten products that will be wrapped up in the coming days as well as where their features are headed.
Aardvark
Aardvark was a start-up Google acquired in 2010. The service helped users answer each other's questions.
According to Google, "While Aardvark will be closing, we'll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world."
Google Desktop
This is another service Google is pulling plug on. According to the company the last few years have seen a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems.
This has given people instant access to their data, whether online or offline.
And since this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
Fast Flip
Google said that it will begin removing Fast Flip, which was unveiled in September 2009, from Google News in the coming days.
"For the past two years, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the Web -- which will live on in our other display and delivery tools," Google said.
Google Maps API for Flash
The company launched Google Maps API for Flash to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although the company is deprecating the API, it will keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash. The company aims to focus on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
Google Pack
This is another service which has been discontinued. According to the company, "Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of Web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack ...." Users can access Google as well as its partners' software through direct links on the Google Pack website.
Google Web Security
Google Web Security came to Google as part of its Postini acquisition in 2007. However, according to the company, since then it has integrated much of the Web security functionality directly into its existing products, such as safe browsing in Chrome.
Here, Google says that although its previous sales channel will be discontinued, it will continue to support its existing customers.
Image Labeler
Google Image Labeler which started as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the Web too has been discontinued.
Notebook
The company will be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, and plans to automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
Sidewiki
Sidewiki is another service which Google is discontinuing. According to Google, Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they'll have a number of months to download their content.