But the search giant hasn’t confined its ambitions to mere hardware and software design. It also wants to reinvent the way the mobile business works.

Heady stuff, but then, Google (GOOG) has already reinvented some industries (ask the old search engines) and is helping reorder others (ask any newspaper publisher). 

The flip side: While Google does launch lots of stuff, many of its products are now on the shelf with other dusty tech curios.

Below are a few of the choicest nuggets in our newest slideshow. Some are first-place finishers, while others had to be killed off and turned into mulch for Google’s organic garden.

Yesterday the company announced Knol (defined as a “unit of knowledge”) , its improvement on the social encyclopedia. With it, the company hopes to encourage experts on a particular subject to write authoritative articles about them, which it can then rank. “The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors,” Google VP of Engineering Udi Manber wrote on the company’s blog. “Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors–but somehow the Web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors’ names highlighted. A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

Oh, and one other thing: “At the discretion of the author, a Knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”

Ah.

Interesting idea, developing an alternative to Wikipedia that rewards contributors for their work with not just a byline, but financial compensation as well. And an easy way to redirect all the traffic Google sends to Wikipedia back to Google itself.