Google is such a big company that it’s sometimes easy to overlook the breadth of its branches; most only discover them when the division closes or becomes the center of controversy. In today’s case, this is the first thing: Closing of Google Domainsthe service that most didn’t know Google had.
Google Domains was introduced in 2014 as the logical evolution of the company’s Internet conquest; and in its time it had the potential to completely change the way we use the web, with the opening of new domain types. Although the division is moving in this direction, with major announcements this month, Google has decided to sell it by surprise to one of its competitors, Squarespace, for $180 million.
Although Google presents the process as a simple way to “tweak” the business, in practice it is another failureanother shuttered service that adds to the very long list of discontinued Google products, alongside illustrious ones such as Google Reader, Stadia cloud gaming and PixelBook laptops.
Google Domains anyway
Although Google Domains may not be as famous as all of these cases, the service has managed to win over 10 million users, which is striking given that it is not a consumer product. AVERAGE. As its name suggests, Google Domains allowed register internet domains, the name we use when we go to enter a web page or want to connect to a service. Therefore, it was aimed at those who wanted to create their own page, and not so much at conventional users. The great advantage of Google Domains was its integration with the rest of Google services, such as Workspace, as well as functions such as DNS hosting and domain and email forwarding (for example, if we already had a different domain and we want the user to enter the new one).
But, above all, Google Domains stood out for the possibility of obtaining original domain extensions (the last part of a page address), like .day, ideal for pages that celebrate special days of the year. like wildlife.day. In fact, that same month, Google Domains got into a controversy by allowing creating .zip domains, something that has been criticized by cybersecurity experts because users might think they are opening a file instead of entering a webpage by clicking the link. That just a few weeks after the announcement of the end of Domains says a lot about how surprised it was.
For Google, domains were going to be an important part of their plan to conquer the Internet. The company envisioned a future in which web pages would look more like Android apps, and vice versa, and in that context, having an attractive and memorable domain was very important. But now Google is more focused on recovering lost ground in artificial intelligenceand after a bad 2022 in which he had to shut down several projects that weren’t generating revenue, he decided to get rid of Domains.
Fortunately, domains created by Google will not be closed, but moved to Squarespace, who will be the new manager of their operation; therefore, for the customers nothing will change, at least for the moment; although it’s no surprise that in the future they have to migrate to the Squarespace platform if they want to keep their domain.
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