Google Squared, News Timeline Get Added To Google’s Chopping Block

The slow demise of Google Labs has put a few more Google tools/services on the chopping block, including Google Squared and Google News Timeline.

Those are two of the most recent experiments that Google has listed for shutdown on the Google Labs home page.

Google Squared

Google Squared launched in 2009 and offered search results in tables, with data presented across rows and down columns. That, at least, was the typical visible form of what Google Squared does/did. But the underlying technology also enabled Google to offer things like related searches and answers to questions, like this:

And in its announcement that Google Squared is shutting down on September 5th, Google says the technology will continue to be used in search results like that.

As part of the phasing out of Google Labs, Google Squared will be shut down on September 5, 2011. Any saved Squares will be deleted. If you would like to keep Squares, you may export them to CSV files or Google Spreadsheets using the Export function on the upper-right hand side of the Squared screen. We will continue to use Google Squared technology to improve search, as we have already done with question answering and related searches.

Google News Timeline

Google announced (and already removed) News Timeline a week ago — on August 17th. This appears to have happened as part of the removal of the Google News Archive search page.

As the name implies, News Timeline presented news search results in a visual timeline format. Here’s what it looked like when it launched in 2009:

Two other smaller projects are on the chopping block:

• City Tours: Google says this will shut down by September 6th. Another 2009 project, this was a tourism-related experiment that, given a city, would suggest sites to see and also map out a detailed itinerary and minute-by-minute travel schedule. You can see a screenshot on our article about City Tours’ launch.
• Realtime Mytracks: No date is given for the shutdown of this unusual tool that allowed users to follow Team HTC – Columbia during a previous Tour de France.

Google previously announced the impending shut down of several other labs projects, including App Inventor for Android and Talk Guru.