Google Orkut
Huge in Brazil. Invisible at Google.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Google said its other products had outgrown it. One of them was Google+.
Orkut launched in January 2004, named after the Google engineer who built it as a 20 percent project. You could rate your friends as "Trustworthy," "Cool" or "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3. Within months a rival sued, pointing to 9 identical bugs as proof the code was copied. By 2008 it was one of the most visited websites in Brazil and India. A Brazilian judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 a day until it handed over user data. On April Fools' Day 2008 it renamed itself "yogurt." Google closed it on September 30, 2014, explaining that Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ had outpaced it. Google+ lasted under five more years.