Google Sidewiki: what happened, and why it shut down

Google Sidewiki was a web annotation service launched on 23 September 2009. With the Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox, or an extension in Chrome, you could open a sidebar next to any web page and read or write comments about it, ranked by Google rather than ordered by time. Website owners could not switch it off. Google announced its closure in September 2011 and shut it on 5 December 2011.

Timeline [edit]

2009

23 September 2009 Launch

Sidewiki ships with the Google Toolbar

2010

2010 Feature

Chrome extension and a developer API

2011

2 September 2011 Shutdown announced

Listed in the fall spring-clean

5 December 2011 Shutdown

Sidewiki switched off

Entries could be exported.

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Sidewiki was listed in Google's September 2011 clean-out of products and switched off in December 2011. Google said it wanted to focus on Google+ and on tools people actually used; Sidewiki had never got past a small number of contributors and had annoyed publishers from the first week.

Our analysis: Sidewiki solved a problem nobody had asked Google to solve, in a way that took something from the people who would have had to live with it. Anyone with the Google Toolbar could open a sidebar on any page and comment on it, and the site owner could not remove or moderate those comments; the best they could do was claim the site and get the first entry. Publishers, led by Jeff Jarvis, pointed out that the comments about their pages now lived on Google rather than with them. It needed a toolbar in an era when toolbars were dying, it needed a critical mass of commenters it never got, and once Google+ arrived in 2011 the company had a social product it actually wanted to push.

History [edit]

A comment box on somebody else\'s page

Sidewiki arrived with the Google Toolbar on 23 September 2009. You clicked a button, a panel opened beside the page, and you could write about what you were looking at or read what other people had written. The entries were not ordered by time: Google ranked them with the same instincts it applied to search, using votes and the contributor\'s history, and every entry was tied to a Google Profile with a real name. Caesar Sengupta, who led the project, argued that the profile link would keep the quality up, because people stop making trivial comments when it ties back to them.

The problem was who owned the conversation. A publisher could claim their site and get the first entry in the sidebar, but they could not delete anything or turn the feature off. Jeff Jarvis wrote that Sidewiki takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google, which robs the site of much of its value. Public relations people saw a new place where complaints about their clients would appear without a moderator. Ars Technica pointed out that the comments were about as good as those on Digg, which was not a compliment.

Switched off with nine others

Not many people installed a toolbar to write annotations. Sidewiki went into Google\'s fall spring-clean announcement on 2 September 2011, alongside Aardvark and eight other products, and was switched off on 5 December 2011. Contributors could export their own entries. Google+ had launched three months earlier, and commenting at Google moved there.

The domain today

Sidewiki was never a website of its own; it lived in a toolbar. The entries are not published anywhere.

Sources [edit]

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Google Sidewiki