Google, Google Reader | featured news

After having its hand slapped for information collection and exposure mishaps -- from Buzz to, most recently, Wi-Spy -- Google is wary of running afoul of regulators over privacy mistakes. Liz Gannes at AllThingsD reports that company sources tell her this fear was part of the reason for the company's unpopular decision to pull the plug on Google Reader: [T]he shutdown wasn’t just a matter of company culture and bigger priorities, sources said.

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

Google Reader is headed to the tech graveyard, with Google announcing that it will shut down the RSS service on July 1. The justification is that Google wants to continue its path to put more resources into fewer products — or, as Larry Page put it in 2011 “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

Google has announced yet another spring cleaning of its various services, and this time around, the company is giving the axe to its Google Reader RSS aggregator. The service, which originally launched back in 2005, will be officially put out to pasture on July 1st, 2013. Reader has gone through a number of iterations, but it had not been significantly updated in a long time. The last time that Google updated the product, it built in integration for the Google+ social network and removed Reader's own native sharing service, causing a bit of a backlash with die hard users. Google is offering users a way to export their Reader content, including lists of users that they follow and starred and liked articles.