Google announced Friday that it would be "spring cleaning" certain features, services and apps.
"Spring cleaning" is the phrase Google uses for shutting down a product.
It's been one year since the company started its "spring cleaning" spree.
"Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users' lives. This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact." Google's senior engineering director, Yossi Matias, said in the company's official blog. "So today we're winding down a bunch more features-bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our 'spring' clean last fall."
Most of the changes it announced were minor, but a few are worth noting.
Google will be axing features like AdSense for RSS feeds, Google News Badges, Classic Plus, Google storage and Gadgets in Spreadsheets.
Google will terminate AdSense for Feeds, where content creators could allow Google to attach their ads. This process was a revenue-generating system. The process will be put to retirement Oct. 2 onward and will be shut down by Dec. 3.
Google plans to combine storage space for Picasa and Drive. This will give users a good 5GB of free storage space. Paid users will not be getting an additional 5GB of storage; rather, it will be a part of the storage they paid. If the user pays for 100GB storage, they will not get 105GB storage, 100GB is all they get.
Google is also eliminating News Badges icons that showed appreciation for a particular news type, like a "U.S. Elections" badge. If the user happens to be a voracious reader, he could win Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Ultimate badges.
The Mountain View-based company has also merged Insights for Search into Google Trends, so users can now see the search trends and compare search patterns in one place.
The Places Directory app is also being taken down, as it has been substituted by Google Maps now.
Google will be removing the Classic Plus feature that allowed users to add customized backgrounds to the Google.com page. So come November, users will be seeing the plain old Google.com search page.
