Google Catalog

Google Catalog too faces axe. The service it launched in 2001 that made it possible to search the full text of hundreds and thousands of product catalogs. This was Google's first big effort to make offline information available online.

Catalogs helped to scan and make the full text of books available online. The search shown catalogs with pages that contain users search terms. Each listing shows the cover of the catalog, an image of the catalog page where the terms were found, and a close-up of the section of the page containing the terms.

The announcement was made by Ounit Soni, Google product manager, on the Inside Google Book Search blog. The posting said that Google's Catalog Search helped the search giant develop other key initiatives like Google Book Search, as well as learn about how users read scanned documents online.

Read the farewell note: “It was a great experiment.” Accepting that the service was not a great success the blog goes, “Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn't been as popular as some of our other products. So from (January 15), we're bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”

Article Source:- http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4124283.cms