Google has stopped its Catalog Search, which allowed those surfing the Web to access thousands of retailers’ catalogs online, citing decreased usage.
The announcement was made by Ounit Soni, a Google product manager, on the Inside Google Book Search blog. The service launched in 2001.
The posting said that Google’s Catalog Search helped the search giant develop other key initiatives like Google Book Search, as well as learn about how users read scanned documents online.
“It was a great experiment,” Soni wrote. “Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So [January 15], we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”
Additionally, five other services are being cut.
Google’s mobile social network, Dodgeball, will be history in the next few months and Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months, as Google hopes users will transfer to its App Engine infrastructure.
Google will also “no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase,” according to another blog entry. Google bought Jaiku, a microblogging service similar to Twitter, in late 2007.
Google will also stop development on Google Notebook, which allowed users to add text, images and links from Web pages to a virtual notebook without leaving their browser windows.
And finally, Google video is kaput. While the site will remain online, users will no longer be able to upload new videos.
