Google Labs is an incubator created by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

to test and publicly demonstrate new projects. The original version was online from early 2002 to mid-2011. Google described Labs as "a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them." In 2023, Google revived Labs at the annual Google I/O keynote.

History

Google also used an invitation-only model for users to test Labs products including

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

, Google Calendar and Google Wave, and many of these also have their own "Labs" experimental features and previews. Labs was later removed from Google Calendar. In 2006, all Google Labs products were presented with a consistent icon, a flask, and a gray title, as opposed to other color-coded Google products, such as

Google News Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web. Google ...

and

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

Discontinuation and revival

In July 2011, Google announced that it was discontinuing Google Labs. Although many of the experiments have been discontinued, a few have moved to the main search pages or have been integrated into other products. Google still has many links to its defunct "Labs" tools in Google blogs that are readily accessible through a Google search. In November 2021, the Google Labs brand was revived for an internal group at Google encompassing Google's AR and VR efforts, Area 120, as well as Project Starline. As of July 2024, Google Labs has introduced Search labs, an experimental AI assisted overview of the google search engine.

References

External links

* Labs Research organizations in the United States {{Google-stub