Google Labs has now closed with no trace remaining. Next to go are Buzz,and Code Search, together with their APIs

Google announced that Labs was to close in July and three months later it has happened. If you currently try and access Google Labs you are transferred to a Google search page without any explanation.

While some of the Labs projects have been saved and given graduate status, for example the Prediction API, others have gone completely. Google is taking the opportunity to sweep away some less-than-successful experiments and has just given notice that Buzz will be shut down within a few weeks.

Buzz is a good example of a promising product that was mishandled. Its initial blunder of showing your complete contacts list to everyone else you were connected with, based on the frequency of your Gmail email conversations was enough to condemn it on privacy issues. However, Buzz lives on within Google+ and its users will be able to view existing content on their Google profiles after its shutdown.

Google has also given notice that, in three months' time, on January 15, 2012, it will shut down Jaiku, a product acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, and remove iGoogle's social features - although not iGoogle itself or it non-social applications.

The same date will see the closure of the University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers and so will affect a limited number of users.

The closure that will have more impact is that of Code Search and its API, which enables users to search for open-source code on the Internet and is used in many plug-ins.

While Google is explaining the closure of social features by pointing to its new focus on Google+, it hasn't provided any explanation of withdrawing this facility.

Related news:

Google Labs to close

Google continues its mass clearout

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.