With the global credit crisis, lower consumer spending, and lower advertising budgets, many companies have had to rein in the spending a bit. This includes, perhaps surprisingly for some, the world's most popular search engine, Google.

Known for its innovation, rapid release-and-update development and project management strategies, and as an incubator for all kinds of technical ideas, Google may seem like it has all the budget in the world for these little asides. Yet as advertisers and consumers have less to spend, Google's primary revenue source - advertising - has taken a hard hit. You may have seen adverts creeping into Google properties you hadn't seen them in before - Google Images, for example. And some of Google's smaller projects have recently been trimmed too - Notebook, Jaiku and Lively, Google's 3D virtual world software, have all bitten the bullet. All of these changes are aimed at reducing the amount of less profitable projects, and increasing the amount of money they take from the more popular services.

This doesn't mean to say that the terminated projects have been a waste - experience and ideas can always be transferred onto existing products. For example, many features of Dodgeball, a recently-closed SMS-based location awareness application, have been put into practice on Google Latitude, an add-on for Google Maps. For more information on Google's cutbacks and newer services, the New York Times has this excellent article.