I'm working on an analysis of Google services/products shutdown, inspired by http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep-services-closed

The idea is to collate as many shuttered Google services/products as possible, and still live services/products, with their start and end dates. I'm also collecting a few covariates: number of Google hits, type (program/service/physical object/other), and maybe Alexa rank of the home page & whether source code was released.

This turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because many shut downs are not prominently advertised, and many start dates are lost to our ongoing digital dark age (for example, when did the famous & popular Google Translate open? After an hour applying my excellent research skills, #lesswrong's and no less than 5 people on Google+'s help, the best we can say is that it opened some time between 02 and 08 March 2001). Regardless, I'm up to 274 entries.

The idea is to graph the data, look for trends, and do a survival analysis with the covariates to extrapolate how much longer random Google things have to live.

Does anyone have suggestions as to additional predictive variables which could be found with a reasonable amount of effort for >274 Google things?