Via Greg Linden's blog post entitled R.I.P. Froogle? I found out the CBS MarketWatch article entitled Google's latest could be aimed at eBay listings which informs us that
In a report for Bear Stearns clients, analyst Robert Peck described a new feature that's based on Google Base, a feature Google launched last October that lets people freely list items for sale.
Simultaneously, Google intends to "de-emphasize" its own Froogle shopping search engine, a Web site featuring paid listings from eBay and other online retailers. Google intends for Froogle to no longer be a standalone Web site; instead its listings would be absorbed by other search features, Peck wrote in his report.
There are a number of things I find interesting about this decision [if it is true]. The first point of interest is that this is another step by Google to move from a world where they crawl the Web to where content is submitted to them to be added to their search index directly. This furthers the trend started by offerings such as Google Webmaster tools (formerly Google Sitemaps) and Google Base. Another point of interest is that it seems Google considers product search to not be its own vertical but instead something that should be included automatically in search results via Instant Answers-type functionality (e.g. search for "movies 98052" exposes entry point into movie search page).
Finally, it looks like this is will be the first instance of Google killing a product that was out of beta highlighted on their main page. What product do you think they should kill next? Here's my list of top 3 Google services that should be sent to the product grave yard
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Google Reader: I remember how scared people were when this service first debutted, however it's slow and unintuitive UI has made it unusable by anyone except die hard Google fans. It's a testament to its crappiness that it doesn't even make the top 20 list of aggregators used by TechCrunch readers which means that even the early adopter crowd is shunning it.
Google Video: Am I the only one that thinks that this entire service should be replaced with a "site:www.youtube.com" based search similar to what they've done with http://www.google.com/microsoft? The site has a decent search engine but almost every other part of the video sharing experience on the service is subpar. Then again, Youtube has set the bar very high.
Orkut: I was talking with a fellow Microsoft employee last week about the fact that when it comes to community sites, it takes more than features for a site to become popular, it takes people. Sites like Facebook, MySpace and even Friendster managed to be chosen by the right set of influencers and connectors to make them hit critical mass. This never happened with Orkut and it never will [except in Brazil]. My suggestion would be to fold the features of Orkut into Blogger, perhaps as a new service as the SixApart folks have done with Vox (aka LiveJournal + TypePad)
That's my list. I'm sure y'all have reasons to agree or disagree, holla at me in the comments. Also, turn about is fair play so if you want to create a list of services you think Yahoo! and Microsoft should kill for similar reasons I'd definitely find it an interesting read.