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.

The initiative’s primary goal is to make Google products easier to use, especially by packaging disparate products. For example, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications.

Flush with cash following its initial public offering two years ago, Google scooped up hundreds of software engineers and began releasing new services at a dizzying pace. “The result occurred precisely because we told these incredible engineering teams to run as fast as possible to solve new problems,’’ Schmidt said. “But then that created this other problem.’’

The company does not plan to tell engineers to halt all new products, Google said, nor does it plan to kill little-used services.

Rather, the effort is focused on future development. After launching “Features, not products’’ this summer, Schmidt said, Google cancelled several new services in development and instructed their creators to instead make features of other products.

“That is a big change in the way we run the company,’’ Schmidt said, describing Google’s previous attitude as: “Just get this stuff built and get it out — don’t worry about the integration.’’

—Chris Gaither / Los Angeles Times