Tag archive: google labs

Google X has always been a thing of mystery. A domain referencing “X” first appeared in 2005, and it was nothing more than an OS X take on Google Search and applications. While it now renders a 404 error, you can access the original via a variety of mirrors preserving the site. But nothing about this Google X ever came to fruition, and when Labs was shuttered last year it generally seemed like Google’s experimental phase was over. However Google… Read More

Earlier today, Google CEO Larry Page announced the end of many projects at Google as well as the closure of Aardvark, a start-up that Google acquired in 2010 that was experimenting with social search. The concept of Aardvark was designed to help people answer questions by searching for the most qualified person on the Web. The company was started by former Google employees and is scheduled to be completely shut down by the end of September.… Read More

Yesterday Google announced it would be pulling the plug on Google Labs. According to its blog, Google wants to spend more time developing and focusing on specific products rather than spreading itself too thin across Labs’ various experiments. This won’t mess with Google’s “20 Percent Time Program,” which allows the team to give 20-percent of their time to side projects of their choosing. But it does mean saying goodbye to the… Read More

While Gmail has supported video and voice calls to other computers since late 2008, they rolled out calls to landline and mobile phones to U.S. and Canadian consumers last year. Announced in an official blog post, Google improved on the calling service with the addition of multi-call support.  This upgrade allows users to send and receive multiple calls at once. Identical to the concept of call waiting, users can switch between calls with the… Read More

Last week, Google CEO Larry Page used the phrase ”more wood behind fewer arrows” to describe an ongoing effort to make Google a sleeker, more focused company. Page went on to declare the products Google Health and Google PowerMeter were the first victims of that effort. Today, Google has announced that it's also shuttering the doors to its idea factory, Google Labs. “Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our… Read More

The month of May might still be a sunny flicker at the end of winter’s long, gloomy tunnel, but it’s already graduation day for six new features from Google’ Gmail labs. On Wednesday night, Google announced that six new features had been plucked from the experimental Labs portion of Google to become standard for everyone, while five will retire for good. Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom… Read More

The Froogle wireless service, a Google Labs experiment, lets users with phones that support Wireless Markup Language (WML) conduct searches on products by going to http://wml.froogle.com, according to a statement issued by Google on Tuesday. Read more on this story at ITWorld.com.