iGoogle with the Winter Scape theme. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google Shuts Down IGoogle

iGoogle, Google's all-in-one homepage site, was finally shuttered in early November. The site's shutdown is only the latest in a long line of rollouts and shutdowns from the giant search engine company, and one that seems to have been a long time coming. In fact, iGoogle's continued existence might have been puzzling to many.

iGoogle Homepage

In many ways, iGoogle was a relic of the internet's past. Stemming from the days in which users would actually set up a homepage for their web browsers, the service helped to bring everything under one simple banner for fans of the service. In today's far more tech-savvy world, though, iGoogle simple doesn't have a place. With so many functions taken over by other useful Google products (indeed, Chrome's home screen does away with the need for the site altogether) and the ease of keeping multiple tabs open at all times, it is shocking that the site remained in use for as long as it has. Other services like Yahoo! still offer similar products for those looking at creating a specific home page for their browsers.

The site's shutdown comes hot on the heels of Google's shutdowns of several other beloved tools, including Google Reader and Google Talk. As the company continues to integrate the functions of its older tools into newer tools or abandons the concepts altogether, it is likely that iGoogle will just be another one of the many services that the search engine giant decides to shut down. For the few remaining users of the service, iGoogle's shutdown may come as a shock. For the rest of the web, it may be more surprising to find that the site continued to hang on.