Google is giving up almost anything outside of its core business of search. So let's add web domains to the list of failed Google experiments: Google Domains is officially toast; its assets, including hosting for 10 million domain names, are being sold off to none other than Squarespace; and the company has been forced to abandon its core business, search.

By the way, if you are interested in the full list of technologies and products that Google has discontinued, please visit the Google Graveyard at killedbygoogle.com. Anyway, the odd thing here is that it was only four weeks ago that Google Domains rolled out eight new TLDs (top-level domains), including .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .mov, and .nexus, in addition to old favorites like .com and .org. nexus.

Of all the new TLDs, the one that caused the most controversy was .zip. .zip allows a fairly obvious opportunity for malicious actors to unwittingly trick you into clicking on a malicious link. It is all too easy to make a link look like a legitimate .zip file download while actually linking to something malicious, potentially scaring even the most Internet-savvy. However, as Jacob notes in his article, experts are divided on just how dangerous the .zip TLD is.

Still, rolling out a major new initiative weeks after giving up on the entire enterprise seems pretty strange by most measures. But this is Google, a huge, sprawling mega conglomerate of technology subsidiaries that gives the impression of heading in about eight often contradictory directions simultaneously.

Of course, it is quite normal for a large company like Google to dabble in numerous experimental technologies simultaneously. It's the old "throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and hope some of it sticks" approach.

Furthermore, the Google Domains service has reportedly remained in beta for a full seven years. It was only last March that it was upgraded to full product status (General Availability, GA, in Google-speak). And now Google is about to give up on this whole business altogether.

It is unclear how all of this will affect the aforementioned new TLDs, including .zip, and whether they will survive the transition. But even if .zip becomes dot-gone, it probably won't be the end of the world.