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With all the fuss over Google+ (and surprisingly good it is too) it’s been easy to miss Google’s other announcement: the death of Google Labs. On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal. It doesn’t mean that Google won’t still be working on cool things. It doesn’t mean the end of the company’s famous ‘20 per cent’ time, where employees get to experiment and come up with new things. It does, however, mean that the secretive company has put up yet another giant metal shutter to hide what it’s doing from the public, and whichever way you cut it, that’s more than a little sad.

Appearances do count. Just ask, well… Ask. For years it had a perfectly creditable search engine, but to the outside world, all that mattered was that it was the site with the helpful butler, Jeeves. Back in 2006, the character was retired in the interests of being a more straight-faced search engine whose top question wouldn’t be “Is Jeeves gay?” Check the site now though and the butler is back. Why? Because in the end, it turned out he was more important than they originally thought. Jeeves wasn’t simply a cartoon butler, but a friendly face. With or without him, the site was a regular search bar, but non-techie users didn’t want to type keywords into a search engine. They wanted to Ask Jeeves, because that just felt… right.

In Google’s case, Labs was an outstretched hand to the geeks who helped make it the world-dominating search engine it is now. It was the chance to see what features might be coming, to tweak and know you were tweaking services that most people just used as-was, and in theory at least, to help push new things into the core product.

Where most of Google is increasingly strait-laced, bar the occasional Easter egg of a particularly clever Doodle (its custom logos for special occasions), Labs was a playground – a semi-hidden screen that proudly proclaimed itself full of “some crazy experimental stuff”. Whether you used many of its features or not, it was good to have them there, and a way of feeling like you were on at least the slightly itchy edge, if not quite the all-out bleeding one.

At the same time, the claimed reason for its shutdown does make sense. Google’s greatest weakness has always been its tendency to dabble in things – to launch or buy a new service with variable levels of excitement, only to lose interest in it, letting it stagnate for months and years after launch. Dodgeball, Lively, Joga Bonito, Notebook, Health, Buzz, Wave… the list is endless. As part of the current shutdowns, Larry Page has said that what the company needs is “more wood behind fewer arrows”, and it’s hard to argue with that. Even major, obviously core projects like Android and Google Apps all too often feel strangely half-finished when you get down to raw details, or suffer from incredibly long periods of silence between updates.

An example? Sure. Google Apps – hosted email, calendars, Docs and similar for companies and education – doesn’t have support for Profiles yet, so users can’t get into Google+. Trying to use an Apps account along with a regular one is a genuine pain, and the only ETA of the feature so far is a ‘soon’ from back in March. There are many similar issues across Google’s portfolio – one that I found recently on my HTC Desire was that after changing my Google password, there was no way to give Android my new one short of doing a factory reset.

With Apple selling on experience and Microsoft so tied into the business world, such sloppiness is a luxury that Google can no longer afford. To remain a dominant player, its releases have to be top quality, polished, and with the passion and confidence to wrestle other giants, not simply impress us geeks with a few new toys.

Labs will continue in spirit of course, and while we might not have a direct-line into the chocolate factory any more, dedicated Oompa-Loompas like Matt Cutts and Google’s other bloggers will still be on hand to drop hints of what to expect. Google knows full well that to stop developing new ideas is to become obsolete, even after a decade at the top of its field, and there’s no point trying to buy in the best and brightest if you’re just going to sit them in a room until their contracts expire – as infamously happened with Dodgeball and a few other projects, and which may have led directly to the company having to acquire the now-closed Jaiku instead of Twitter. It’s just a shame that now we’ll get things when they’re ready and no sooner. It makes sense, but it’s still the end of an era.