Google discontinues some of its least used services

Google's Urs Hölzle revealed on the company's blog that the search giant will eliminate several of its least popular services. Google Bookmarks List is heading to the chopping block on December 19, 2011, and Google Friend Connect will be retired for all non-Blogger websites on March 1, 2012.

Web application browser extension Google Gears will be axed on December 1, 2011, and online collaboration project Knol will close down on April 30, 2012. Google Wave hasn't been updated in over a year and will become read-only on January 31, 2012, before being turned off completely on April 30, 2012.

The Google Search Timeline will also disappear, the company explains users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page, while historical trends for web search can be viewed at google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/, or at http://books.google.com/ngrams/.

The search engine also closed down Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal. This initiative was aimed at driving down the cost of renewable energy, but Google now believes other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level.

Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal —This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts. We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.