An interesting article emerged today about some of the features that Google lost, or had to drop, over the years. While the tendency back then was to see more and more applications and projects emerging, not all of them worked out.

One of the smallest, but most beloved projects, was Google X, a small homage to Mac OS X. It was a basic Google homepage but with a Mac OS inspired bar on top of the search field with icons that increased, very much in the way that the bar works in the Apple OS.

You can still find some mirrors on the internet, though they keep receiving cease-and-desist letters. Even so, enjoying this feature is but google search away.

Another lost feature, though much less popular, was the very popular instant “whois” search that allowed you to see who registered a certain domain. Google wasn’t very specific on the details, though it’s pretty obvious they disabled it because of privacy issues.

Google Answers was sort of Google’s upgrade to their “Groups”. It was a paid question & answer service and had 500 researchers participating. Unfortunately the project wasn’t as profitable as they expected, and thus they slowly cut off the traffic to the site and eventually it turned into an archive.

You can see many more Google projects that never left their infant stages in the original article.

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