In another sign of Google Inc’s growth from start-up to serious business, the company’s top executives have said they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and to instead focus on making existing ones work together better. The shift is a major departure from Google’s prior strategy of launching new services rapid-fire, and it highlights the eight-year-old company’s struggle to stay focused during rapid growth.

Co-founder Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called “Features, not products.’’ He said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realised the myriad of product releases was confusing users. “It’s worse than that,’’ said Brin, Google’s president of technology. “It’s that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.’’

More than 50 products, in various stages of development, are available on Google’s websites. There are so many that the company has collected 35 on a site called “More Google products’’, which includes digital maps, instant messaging software, programs that speed up Web surfing — and even a search engine for mail-order catalogues.

Analysts said Google was fighting a problem that had historically plagued technology giants, many of which became so enamoured with innovating that they forgot to create products people would really use. “They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,’’ Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google.

Earlier this year, Google said its internal audits had discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.

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