Google is shuttering Google Compare, its US comparison-shopping site for auto insurance, credit cards and mortgages after one year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The quick reversal is a setback to the Alphabet unit's efforts to use its enormous reach to provide consumers with niche shopping services and financial-services tools, the Journal said.
The company said in an email to its partners on Monday that Google Compare's US and UK services would start winding down this month and terminate on March 23, according to the Journal.
Google said the service didn't meet its expectations and that the company will now focus on AdWords and future innovations, the paper reported citing the email.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment outside US business hours.
With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...