Thank you very much for trying out Google Research Datasets, providing interesting datasets, and giving us extremely useful feedback. We have learned a lot about the issues facing researchers and dataset producers from this testing period.

As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users.

It has been a difficult decision, but we have decided not to continue work on Google Research Datasets, but to instead focus our efforts on other activities such as Google Scholar, our Research Programs, and publishing papers about research here at Google.

The Google Research Datasets service will remain active until the end of January 2009 during which time any datasets may be downloaded. For those datasets that are impractical to download, we will also happily provide interested users with a copy via hard drive shipment.

Once again, we’d like to thank you for helping us test Google Research Datasets, it’s been a very useful experience, and we look forward to finding new ways to provide you with useful services in the future.

The Google Research Datasets team

Copyright 2008. Google Inc, 1600 Ampitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

http://mndoci.com/blog/2007/08/09/scifoo-google-and-large-scientific-datasets/