Google Social Search Mysteriously Shut Down

Google is always introducing new features and products, but it plays it safe and the most experimental ones usually end up in Google Labs, Gmail Labs, and the likes. Even so, things usually work out all right and, apart from the usual bugs and hiccups, there isn't too much drama. It now looks like Google has finally hit a snag big enough that it has pulled down the recently launched Social Search altogether and it won't be available until later today or even tomorrow.

Over the weekend, people started noticing that the feature had mysteriously vanished without a trace. Speculation ran rampant, as is usually the case; however, Google finally issued an official statement that acknowledged the matter, but didn't really do anything to clear up the matter. All the company said was: “The Google Social Search experiment is temporarily down. We are working on it and expect to restore access sometime Monday or Tuesday.”

It's a pretty big issue as this hasn't really happened at Google before. Services have been down, even its biggest products like Gmail aren't safe from it, but this isn't an outage, the service has been completely removed for the time being. Of course, being an experimental product, Google has the luxury of doing this and users can't really complain, as using any Labs experiment implies the realization that things may go horribly wrong.

With no way of knowing what happened just yet, the reason for the move remains pure speculation. Bugs are common in early stage products like this, so it wouldn't be too surprising if a bug big enough to take down the entire feature pops up. Anyway, these don't usually require days to be fixed and some people are suggesting that a pretty big privacy issue might have arised, forcing Google to shut down the experiment completely. While this is somewhat less likely, the privacy issue of the service is a real concern, as it handles huge amounts of potentially sensitive albeit public data.