• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 23, 2011

The housecleaning continued at Google, this week, as the search giant put imminent expiration dates on another group of underperforming products and services. The newly fated projects include Google’s wannabe Wikipedia, Google Knol, Google Friend Connect -- which clearly lost out to Google+ -- and Google Wave.

“These products did not take off for Google as originally anticipated, so they are letting them die out, leaving room for more important projects such as Google+, which is starting to see deeper integrations with successful Google products such as YouTube,” VentureBeat writes.

“Since Google CEO Larry Page took the helm this past spring, one of the company’s most visible initiatives has been to trim and shut down its products that haven’t taken off,” TechCrunch reports.

“Earlier this year, [Page] announced plans to shed businesses that didn't offer big opportunities in order for Google to focus on the ones that do,” adds CNet.

To date, additional casualties have included Aardvark, Google Desktop, Fast Flip, Code Search, Buzz, Jaiku, and Google Labs.

In most cases, once Google’s decides to kill a project, the writing is already on the wall. Indeed, the only service TechCrunch was surprised to see go, this week, was Knol -- and that’s only because it thought the site had already been shut down.

“Sitting on Death Row for some time now, Mountain View has slowly phased out the less-than-successful products, most recently announcing that it would kill seven APIs including Translate and Video Search,” Engadget writes. “The sweep is part of Google's VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz' overall plan to ‘[do] less of throwing things against the wall,’ focusing instead on ‘doing fewer things well.’” 

While more mature and business-minded, some suggest that Google’s streamlining may hasten a less innovation culture at the company. It could be argued, however, that Google is merely making room for new and better ideas going forward.