With the Highs Come the Lows:

Top Google Project Fails

Google has long been known for its search engine service. In fact, it’s the very service that the company built its entire empire upon. Its success with the service is such that the word “google” has since been added to the formal English lexicon.

Despite this synonymity with “internet information searching,” Google has been branching out to other business opportunities for a number of years now. Among its most successful ones are its two virtual maps programs, Google Earth and Google Maps; its Google Android mobile operating system; and its Google handsets (outsourced to phone manufacturers) optimized to get the fullest out of Android.

Recently, the internet giant has been making heads turn with their current R&D project (read: prototype), the Google Glass. If things proceed as planned, we could all be looking at what will be the very first commercially available (assuming the technology has already been used by the military, as most of these newfangled techs are) head-mounted augmented reality display. The future is looking bright indeed, not just for Google but for technological development as a whole.

Of course, despite these successes, Google has taken its share of failure with its attempts at diversification. Here are the most notable.

1.       Google Knol

Knol was Google’s bid to dethrone Web 2.0 encyclopedia champ Wikipedia. Made available to the public for interfacing in July 2008, the project eventually folded due to a bevy of programming and publicity dilemmas.

Most surprisingly, one of the causes of its demise was the far superior SEO efforts of Wikipedia. Since SEO trends are largely dictated by Google, having another company beat you at your own game should be more than enough to convince anyone to throw in the towel.

2.       Google Wave

Back in the latter part of the 2000s, a mass migration of users occurred, switching their social networking site preference from Myspace to Facebook. Incidentally, Wave was released just as Facebook’s popularity shot through the roof.

When Wave was starting to gain some ground (which happened concurrently with Facebook facing problems of its own), industry pundits speculated that another mass migration was very likely to occur. Fast-forward to today, and not only has this not happened, but Google shut down Wave as well.

A big factor in Wave’s departure was its ambition to expand the concept of social networking. Aside from the usual features we’re all familiar with, Google implemented instant messaging, email, wikis, and whatnot to the mix. This made Wave rather complex for most users to handle, which wasn’t helped any by the fact that Wave’s interface was just as muddy as its concept.

Google seems to have learned its lesson though: Google+, Wave’s apparent “successor,” seems to be taking things one step at a time. Only time will tell how this strategy will pan out.

3.       Google Video

When you think of search engines, Google undoubtedly springs to mind. In the same vein, when you mention internet videos, and you can bet that most people will think of YouTube.

As with the case of every other dominating presence, YouTube’s success put a bullseye on its back. Not content with being at the top of the search engine arena (though that really isn’t necessarily a bad thing), Google tried its hand at video-sharing too.

Unfortunately for the company, Google Video wasn’t able to garner any attention. Google’s penchant for simply taking videos from other video-sharing sites like Metacafe, Vimeo, and of course YouTube, did it in. Also, Google Video’s nonexistent content filtering played a huge part in its termination.

4.       Google Buzz

Finally, we have Google Buzz. Many are calling this Google’s biggest fail, simply because it didn’t really bring anything new to the microblogging table. Accordingly, Buzz being out there was just one Twitter too many.

A simple end to a simple program. ‘Nuff said.

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