As part of it’s “off-season spring cleaning,” Google today announced the end of a handful of services, including Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google Knol. The thinking behind the initiative is to free up resources for Google+ and other higher-priority projects. While some of the shut-downs make sense, others are a little more unexpected.

Google Wave, the failed next-generation communication tool, was put on ice more than a year ago, and now it’s being shut down for good – which is a little sad, but makes sense; Google Buzz, Google Wave and Jaiku are all pretty much redundant thanks to Google+. As of January 31, 2012, it will become read-only, and it will disappear altogether on April 30.

Ditto Google Knol, which was meant to work as an open-access knowledge base kind of like Wikipedia; the internet doesn’t need two Wikipedias.

What’s less clear is why Google Code Search – which indexes open source code on the web — and the  University Research Program for Google – which allows university researchers API access to search results – are being shut down too.

Stuff’s being shut down on the physical platform too – namely, Google’s “Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal” solar power initiative. Google’s reasoning is that  “at this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level.”

All of which suggests that Google is betting pretty heavily on Google+. It’s not clear that that’s going to work out for them.

[Source: CNET]