Google rules the web.
Anyone that disagrees to the above statement is either ignorant or foolish.
And taking into account the fact that they had been around for just only 19 years, there will be the need to give them more accolades.
The most apparent reason for the outstanding growth of Google could be attributed to the brilliant minds that they employ into the company.
These intelligent engineers at Google help in developing all these popular and useful products that you know of today - from their highly developed search box to their Android OS.
But not everything the company touches turns to gold.
Most of the innovative products and projects of Google didn't live to see the twelve moons of the year, some didn't even see the light of the day.
They were shut down as soon as they began.
It could be that those projects were not yielding enough revenue or that the project had some serious privacy issues associated with it or that it was simply NOT user friendly (Remember Google Labs).
Of course, all successes have their corresponding failures. So, it's okay for Google to have some failures too.
And for the past 19 years, they had developed and killed off many unsuccessful projects. We wrote only about 3, if you know more, please tell us in the comments.
Outlined below are the top three projects that Google killed off and buried in its 'graveyard'.
1. Google Buzz
Once upon a time, Google wanted to become Facebook.
It developed Google Buzz to be a gmail functionality which could enable anyone to do virtually everything they could do on Facebook (i.e share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments) organized in a feed like pattern.
But, it didn't work out.
It was instantly shut down on December 15, 2011. Google later developed Google plus to be a replacement for Google buzz.
2. Google Health
This is one of the fantastic and highly useful innovations of Google.
And it could have imparted the health industry had it been that it lived long enough.
The aim of Google Health was to provide a centralized database of health records that could be accessed by any authentic hospital in administering medications.
When users volunteer their health records, they will be provided useful health information like how they should take their medications.
It was the first time that Google partnered with health service providers.
And it was the first time Google didn't make money from their project.
They finally waved goodbye to the Google Health project January 1, 2012.
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3. Google Reader
In early 2005, people found the 'fresh contents' on their favorite blogs by subscribing to its RSS/Atom feed.
Google took advantage of this trend to develop its Google Reader - a platform that aggregates all your blog subscriptions in one place.
The number of people using Google Reader increased like wild fire.
After 8 years of enjoying huge popularity, its user base began to grow thin. Google had to shut it down on July 1, 2013.
It is not hard to observe from the above cases that Google cares so much about the usefulness, user base and the profitability of each and everyone of their projects.
Apart from these three cases, the above factors might have served as a catalyst to the shutting down of other projects not mentioned on this post.
But Google is not done yet with it's killing spree.
Who knows what they will shut down next?
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