Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has lost a rare battle. The world's do-everything search and software king says it will be shutting down its Google Answers service, where customers paid to get questions answered. The reasons likely have to do with economics, as well as the success of Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) Answers, which is free and has a more vibrant community.
Curious about what else the famed Google engineers have scuttled in the past, we shrunk our Fool investigative reporters down to mere nanometers to help them infiltrate the top-secret servers of Google Labs. Here's what we found:
Top 10 Other Google Discarded Projects
10. Godoogle: Answers questions such as "What is the meaning of life?", "Why is there war, hunger, pain, and suffering in the world?", and "How is Paris Hilton famous?"
9. Gmail 2.0: Calls you at home, in the middle of the night, to tell you all the fascinating things it's been reading in your email.
8. Koogle: A line of Jewish food so straightforward and easy to make that it will replace Mexican and Italian as America's favorite ethnic food.
7. DoesThisMakeMeLookFatoogle: Scan a photo of yourself in those jeans/dress/former frat logo-wear and get an honest "yes" or "no" answer from the Google algorithm.
6. Google SatelliteNet: This sophisticated worldwide network of artificial intelligence is 100% guaranteed not to go crazy and decide to annihilate humanity -- or your money back.
5. Googster: Google's free (ad-supported, natch) music service, containing 900 billion songs. And that's just the country section.
4. Beer Googles: An interactive database about beer and the effects on your body (calculates image distortion based on user input).
3. Google PAPS: Detailed medical information for everyone in your neighborhood.
2. New toolbar application that weighs the price of an ounce of gold relative to a single share of Google.
1. Google Windows Vista: Because of antitrust concerns, it was too soon to totally wipe Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) off the face of the planet.
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