Search Engine, Google Reader | featured news

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 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.