Official line
Service discontinued.
Google · Commerce · Product
Google Catalogs
Discontinued
2011–2015 · 4 years in market
Launched
Jan 1, 2011
Discontinued
Jan 1, 2015
Cause of death
Too early / too late
Evidence
Unsourced
What was it?
Digitized print catalogs. A museum of a dying medium.
Why it died
Editorial reading
Print catalogs were already losing to e-commerce search.
Founder takeaway
Do not digitize a distribution channel that is already dying. Index the merchants instead.
Sources
Unsourced — editorial reading
No primary source is attached yet. Treat the interpretation as editorial, not a citation.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
RIP
Google Offers
2011–2013 · 2 yrs
Google’s Groupon clone, launched at the peak of daily-deal mania and gone with the bubble.
Commerce/Too early / too late+40
RIP
Google Wave
2009–2012 · 3 yrs
A real-time collaborative document that tried to replace email, chat, and wikis at once. Brilliant, baffling, and dead in three years.
Productivity/Too early / too late+9
RIP
Google Reader
2005–2013 · 8 yrs
The RSS reader a generation of journalists and power users treated as a daily driver. Killed as RSS faded and Google chased social.
Media & Publishing/Low usage+39
RIP
Google Trips
2016–2019 · 3 yrs
Offline travel itineraries from Gmail reservations. Folded into Maps and Assistant.
Maps & Local/Replaced by successor+37