BANGALORE, INDIA: Search giant Google, which had recently announced the laying off of 100 recruiters and shutting down three engineering offices, said that it will be closing down some of its lesser known service, which indicates that the company is also feeling the heat of global economic recession.

The services that will be discontinued by Google include Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku.

Google has confirmed that it has abandoned the side projects to focus efforts on improving more popular products.

Vic Gundotra, vice president, engineering, Google in his blog said, “We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available. We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly.”

Dodgeball.com is a mobile social networking service that lets users share their location with friends via text message.

He further added, “We have decided to shut down the Mashup Editor, currently in limited private beta, in favor of the more powerful App Engine infrastructure. Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months.”

However Jaiku, a twitter like service by Google will be released in a open source platform after migrating it with Google App engine.

“With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll their own micro blogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine.” mentioned Gundtora in his blog.

The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we're excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source micro blogging platform the blog further added.

The company will also discontinue services of catalog search, Google Notebook and also support of uploading video.

The Google's video blog mentioned, “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video.
 Don't worry, we're not removing any content hosted on Google Video -- this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service.”

When CyberMedia asked about the 'axe effect' on India, a Google India Spokesperson said: "We are presently hiring to need in India, and are not making any other changes."