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You probably recall the stories and, well, I may have even written one or two of them, including the requisite quotes from Google spokespersons. They were about the spirit of innovation at Google Labs, and whether or not the model of trying a plethora of new projects simultaneously and let Darwin decide the victor, was a smart way to construct a viable service.

The lessons, as Google would teach them, went something like this: There are many different ways to build great products, and there's no way to know in advance which way is the best. Whenever possible, Google leans toward "openness," which involves as many of its target consumers as possible... wait a minute. What am I doing babbling on about it, when I can let Google's own history speak on its own behalf?

Google Labs is over, the company announced today in a short post to the official Google Blog. Labs was the official home of many of Google's experimental projects - from a map of the human body to a Gmail plug-in that tried to stop people from sending emails while drunk.

To be frank, it was an incoherent, unsatisfying, poorly supported tangle of perpetual alpha and beta technologies. Google would likely prefer it be seen as a relic of the Pre-Plus Era, back when Google "didn't get social software." The whole company is remaking itself now, with a very well received social network as the common thread now running through all the company's sprawling properties around the web. Google Plus wasn't a Labs Beta, it was a company-wide "field test" developed in deep secrecy and then shared with 10 million people who couldn't get enough of it.

Google Labs has come out with a new tool that it is calling "Like Google Trends in reverse." Google Correlate allows users to enter a data series and get back queries that follow a similar pattern. Correlate is based off the technology that Google used to create Google Flu Trends.

When you enter a data set into Correlate, it uses the Pearson Correlation Coefficient - a principle of statistics regarding data sets - to show the highest related coefficient within the search term. Correlate data can be input from either a spreadsheet or by exporting a CSV. Correlate also has pre-existing data sets from locations like states.

Google has quietly launched a new Labs project today - Google Shared Spaces. Based on Google Wave gadgets technology, Shared Spaces is designed to be an easy way to create and share collaborative applications.

As Shared Spaces uses Wave technology, there are already 50 different gadgets available, including shared maps, scheduling tools, polls, Sudoku games, and drawing boards.

Google Labs launched a great new tool yesterday that graphs the frequency of occurrence of any search terms from across 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, over the last 200 years, in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

Called the Books Ngram Viewer, the tool offers a fascinating look at the way that language, literature and culture have changed throughout recent history. I've been typing in all kinds of fun searches and have included screenshots of 10 of my favorites below. What do all these changes mean? It's probably fodder for endless after dinner conversation and drinking games. Some of them are surprising and some are not at all. We would love it if you would share your thoughts and links to your favorite Ngram search results with other ReadWriteWeb readers in comments below. Thanks, Google, for providing this great example of the beauty made possible through indexing large sets of data.

Google has unveiled the latest addition to Google Labs, its text autocompletion tool Google Scribe. Scribe takes a look at the text you've already entered and tries to predict the next word or phrase, offering a drop down list of suggestions for you to chose from.

The most obvious application for Google Scribe is as a keystroke saver for Google's mobile platform, Android, and as an Internet-wide form of Google Suggest, the tool that suggests search terms as you type. In the meantime, it will likely offer up some entertainment and a bit of procrastination.

Google has released a new version of Google Goggles with an exciting new feature: translation.

According to the company's blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone's camera.

When Google has an idea for a fun or useful project based on one of their established properties, they will often categorize that project under the heading of Google Labs.  Google Labs have been created on everything from search, to Gmail, to Picasa.  And today, a new Labs opens its doors: Google Toolbar Labs.

Limited to the Internet Explorer 6 web browser, for now, Google Toolbar Labs debuts with two toolbar variations with different goals. One toolbar includes enhanced location detection and the other optimizes the toolbar for the Chinese character set.

Google released two new labs projects today: Similar Images and Google News Timeline. Similar Images, as the name implies, allows you to restrict image searches to pictures that are similar to a source picture while Google News Timeline presents a new interface for searching Google News. Google Labs has now also moved to its own Googlelabs.com domain and sports a new interface.

A few weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft had acquired online gaming advertising platform Massive for "between $200-$400 million". Now I've discovered that a kiwi (from Wellington of course!) was one of the co-founders. According to this NZ Herald story, 31-year-old Wellingtonian Claudia Batten founded Massive Inc four years ago with two expat Australians in New York. They developed pioneering software that dynamically delivers advertising into online video games:

"Tapping into the "Lost Boys" market - hard-to-target 18- to 34-year-old males - was the key to the company's success, Batten said.

"We told advertisers: 'We've found the Lost Boys. They're playing games and we can get you in front of them'."

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday from Seattle, Batten was coy about how much she got from the sale, reported at between US$200-400 million ($643m). "It's all under wraps. I'm really pleased with the outcome, it's better left at that," she laughed."

Thanks Dave ten Have for the tip. There's a lot of software talent in Wellington - TradeMe (NZ's eBay) got bought for nearly half a billion US dollars in March and AfterMail went for US$45M in January. Must be something in the water here :-)