Friday, May 12, 2006

Everything About Google : Part IV

Google offers a variety of services and tools besides its basic web search. This is a partial list of Google's services and tools.

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Services

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dodgeball.com

Main article: dodgeball.com

* dodgeball.com

Mobile social software. Dodgeball.com is a new social networking site built specifically for use on mobile phones. Google purchased the website in 2005. This website was previously privately owned.

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Alerts

Main article: Google Alerts

* Google Alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent by Google when there are new Google results chosen search terms. Currently the service offer four types of alerts: 'News,' 'Web,' 'News & Web,' and 'Groups.'. Such alerts can be configured to be mailed as soon as new news get discovered or daily.

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Analytics

Main article: Google Analytics

* Google Analytics

Google Analytics was launched on November 18, 2005. It is a free service that generates detailed statistics about traffic to a website. Its main highlight is that webmasters can optimize their ad campaigns through Google Analytics' analysis of where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical location. The homepage reads: "Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site." The service is based on the Urchin software that Google acquired when it took over Urchin Software Corporation.

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Answers

Main article: Google Answers

* Google Answers

Google Answers is an Internet search and research service offered for a fee by Google.

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Base

Main article: Google Base

* Google Base

Google Base was officially launched in beta on November 16, 2005, but was already alive earlier for brief amounts of time. Its homepage read: "Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free." The official statement from Google Inc at this time, as posted on Google Blog on Nov. 16, 2005, is: Today we're excited to announce Google Base, an extension of our existing content collection efforts like web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We'll host the items and make them searchable for free.

Google Base enables content owners to give a structure to their information and make it easily searchable online, it can be related in its principle to a simplified Semantic Web, information is described using labels and attributes.

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Blog Search

* Google Blog Search

On September 14 2005, Google launched Blog Search. It is Google search technology focused on blogs. Results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger. Blog Search's blog index is continually updated. Blogs written in English can be searched, as well as those written in other languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese.

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Bookmarks

* Google Bookmarks

A free online bookmark storage service available to Google Account holders. This service organizes bookmarks with tags and bookmarks labeled homepage will be displayed on your Personalized Homepage.

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Book Search

Formerly Google Print

* Google Book Search

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004, Google introduced its Google Print service, now known as Google Book Search. This tool searches the full text of books that Google scans and stores in its digital database. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service (google.com). Or, a user may search just for books at the dedicated Google Book Search service. [1] Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and prohibits page printing and text copying. [2].

As of December 2005, the Google Book Search service remains in a beta stage but the underlying database continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now indexed and included in search results. A similar service, known as Search Inside the Book, is offered by Amazon.com's A9.com.

In December 2004, Google signaled an extension to its Google Print initiative known as the Google Print Library Project. [3] Google announced partnerships with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the University of Michigan, Harvard (Widener Library), Stanford (Green Library), Oxford (Bodleian Library), and the New York Public Library. According to press releases and university librarians, Google plans to digitize and make available through its Google Book Search service approximately 15 million volumes within a decade. The announcement soon triggered controversy, as publisher and author associations challenged Google's plans to digitize, not just books in the public domain, but also titles still under copyright. Google's Library Project later spurred a group led by Yahoo!, called the Open Content Alliance.

On November 17, 2005, Google changed the name of this service from Google Print to Google Book Search. [4] Its program enabling publishers and authors to include their books in the service was renamed Google Books Partner Program and the partnership with libraries became Google Books Library Project.

Google Book Search remains controversial. While many hail the initiative for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge, the publishing industry and writers' groups decry the project as a wholesale rights-grab. The Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers have individually sued Google, citing 'massive copyright infringement'.

See also: List of digital library projects

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Calendar

Main article: Google Calendar

* Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a free online calendar service from google similar to the one offered by Yahoo! or MSN. It was started on April 13, 2006. Google Calendar offers importing and exporting with Apple iCal and importing only with Microsoft Office Outlook. This service is also compatible with Mozilla Sunbird

The Google Calendar allows users to store different events in the calendar and share a part of it with friends or with general public. It is quite similar to the Yahoo Calendar which was introduced in 1998. However, Yahoo Calendar does not have the capability for sharing events, and has remained more or less the same since its inception.

The most important feature of Google Calendar is the use of natural language processing to simplify how events are entered. The feature allows users to type simple commands such as, "leave work today at 5 p.m.," or, "drinks Thursday with Elinor," that the system can interpret and automatically insert into the calendar. Events can be private, shared with friends, or made public on the Web.

Google Calendar users can search for events in a search bar by typing in keywords, events, or people's names. Events also can be quickly created by typing in simple messages with a day of the week and the item is automatically generated.

In addition, users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with an email address, send reminders via email or mobile phone text messages, and keep track of RSVPs from within the program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a customized view, and display only certain events at a time on their calendar view.

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Catalogs

* Google Catalogs

As of April 2006, Google Catalogs is in the beta stage. Numerous (over 6,600 at the time of this writing) print catalogs are archived on Google as scanned image files. Through the use of character recognition, users can search for a text string in these catalogs in a fashion similar to how they would for materials on the general web. Matching results are displayed through thumbnails of the pages on which the text was found, with the specific area of the page where the search result is found shaded in a yellow box. Another image file next to the thumbnail, a shrunk version of the highlighted area on the thumbnail, highlights the exact location of the search result. Users can then access the page of the catalog (as a larger graphic file) and change pages by using a navigation bar positioned above the page image. It might be worth noting that one can access the catalogs without a search as well.

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Co-op

Main article: Google Co-op

* Google Co-op

Google says that "Google Co-op is a way for users to help us improve search. It lets people and organizations label web pages and create specialized links related to their unique expertise. Whether it's information about a hobby, a profession, or an unusual interest, everyone can contribute to making Google search more relevant and useful for the entire community." Google launched the service on 10 May 2006.

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Directory

* Google Directory

Google Directory launched April 2000. The directory is a subset of the links in Google's database arranged into hierarchical subcategories, like an advanced Yellow Pages of the web. The source of the directory, and its categorization is from the Open Directory Project (ODP). The ODP publishes an easily parsed version of its database in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format for other sites, like Google, to use for derivative directories. The Websites in the Google Directory are sorted by PageRank.

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EPayments

Sometimes referred to as GBuy is Google's EPayments System. It is integrated with the Google Account system and works with other Google products such as Google Base and Store.

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Finance

* Google Finance

On March 21, 2006, Google, Inc. launched the new Google Finance website (Official Blog Post). The service features the latest business and enterprise headlines for many corporations including their financial decisions and major news events about the company in question.

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Froogle

Main article: Froogle

Froogle is a price engine that searches online stores for particular products. It is also offered in Wireless Markup Language (WML) form and can be accessed from cellphones or other wireless devices that have support for WML.

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Gmail

Main article: Gmail

* Gmail

Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free webmail and POP e-mail service, currently in beta testing, from Google, Inc. Its competitors include AIM Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and Microsoft's Hotmail.

Gmail was initially released on April 1, 2004. Since Gmail is still in "beta", access to the service is restricted to those who have received an invitation from an existing account holder, from Blogger, or through their mobile phone. Some believe Gmail will continue to be invitation-only even after the beta phase in order to reduce the risk of spam.

While Gmail is not entirely open to the general public yet, Google gives existing users the ability to invite people to Gmail. Google also sometimes randomly gives out invites as links on its homepage. It is also possible to sign up using SMS in certain countries or if one has a .edu e-mail address. Google has prohibited the sale of Gmail addresses online, although some people still do.

The service is notable for providing over 2.7 (and counting) gigabytes (2700 megabytes) (as of 17 April 2006) of storage space (increased from the original limit of 1000 megabytes). This change was announced on April Fool's Day 2005, and was made for the one-year anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would continue to increase storage until they reached the theoretical limit (infinity gigabytes) then give each user one more. All Google will say about this now is that it will keep increasing by the second as long as they have enough space on their servers. Gmail makes intensive use of modern browser features such as JavaScript and keyboard access keys, allowing for a richer user experience, while retaining the benefits of a web application (most importantly, immediate availability of the service on any computer with a supported browser: Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla Application Suite 1.4+, Firefox 0.8+, Safari 1.2.2+, Netscape 7.1+, or the Opera browser). Gmail also offers "Basic HTML view" to allow users to access the Gmail messages from almost any computer running browsers that do not fully support the more advanced features.

There has been some criticism about Gmail's information and privacy policies. Much of it stems from phrases in Gmail's Privacy Policy which state that Gmail will keep all e-mail for "some time" even if it has been deleted or the account terminated and that Gmail will disclose personal information (including the actual text of e-mails) if it has a "good faith belief" that such a disclosure is necessary for various reasons such as the very vague "protect the rights, property or safety of ... the public."[3]

Another unresolved issue discussed among privacy advocates is the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies. More than 30 privacy and civil rights organizations have urged Google to suspend Gmail service until these issues are resolved [4].

Newest from Gmail is a Chat feature, that allows Gmail users to Chat with other Gmail or Google talk users.

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Groups

Main article: Google Groups

* Google Groups

Google maintains a Usenet archive, called Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as Deja News). Google is currently testing a new version of its Groups service, which archives mailing lists hosted by Google in addition to Usenet posts, using the same interface as Gmail (see below). Formally known as "Google Groups Beta," the new version of Google Groups is much more advanced than the last, letting you more easily join a group, make a group, and track your favorite topics. However, many users preferred the old interface and find the new one cluttered.

The original Google Groups interface, which was preferred by a great number of regular Usenet posters to the current Beta version, due to its closer adherence to established Usenet Netiquette, was available until May 4, 2005, on the domains http://www.google.ca and http://www.google.co.uk, and, according to the (non-official) google.public.support.general FAQ, until July 28, 2005 on some other sites; it is currently unavailable on all Google Groups sites.

See also: X-No-Archive

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Images

In 2003, Google announced Google Images, which allows users to search the web for image content. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When searching for an image, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed. Then when clicking on a thumbnail, the image is displayed in a frame at the top of the page and the website on which that image was found is displayed in a frame below it, making it easier to see from where the image is coming.

* Google Images website

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Labs

Main article: Google Labs

* Google Labs

Google Labs consists of all of Google's experimental technologies. Google Labs is akin to a directory page that links to all Google technologies under development or in beta that have not yet been made widely available. From the Google Labs home page, a user can access Google Suggest, Google Desktop Search, and other web technologies.

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Maps

* Google Maps

Formerly Google Local and before that was called Google Maps.

On February 8, 2005, Google introduced a beta release of an online map service called Google Maps, which only covered the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland. It can interact with Google Local to restrict results to a certain areas. The service features draggable maps, a location search, and turn-by-turn directions. It has received early praise for the speed of its operation, produced by the pre-rendering of the maps it uses. It currently works with Internet Explorer, Mozilla-based browsers (such as Mozilla Firefox), Opera and Safari web browser. On April 4, 2005, Google added satellite imagery to Google Maps. Originally limited to North America and the United Kingdom, the satellite imagery was extended to include the whole world in June 2005, also in June of 2005 the Google Maps API was released. On October 6, The service was then merged with Google Local Search and was called Google Local. On November 7, 2005 Google launched Google Local for mobile, a free service that combines directions, maps and satellite imagery and it should work with most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones. On April 21, 2006, Google reverted the name of Google Local back to Google Maps due to popular demand for the previous name. The only difference in the service was the name change. On April 26,2006, Google released beta versions of Google Maps for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and featured better high imagery coverage as well.

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Mars

Main article: Google Mars

* Google Mars

On March 13, 2006, Google added imagery of Mars to its Google Maps interface. This coincided with the anniversary of the birth of astronomer Percival Lowell.

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Mobile

* Google Mobile website

Allows users to search using Google from wireless devices such as mobile phone and PDAs.

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Moon

Main article: Google Moon

* Google Moon

On July 20, 2005, in honor of the first manned Moon landing on the July 20, 1969, Google has added NASA imagery to Google Maps. As a joke, the closest zoom level features an image of cheese instead of the moon surface. This plays on the English expression that "the moon is made of Swiss cheese."

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News

Main article: Google News

* Google News

Google introduced a beta release of an automated news compilation service, Google News, in April 2002. There are different versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages, with more added all the time. While the selection of news stories is fully automated, the sites included and the algorithms that choose the news articles to be displayed are selected by human editors, and the choices have occasionally led to some controversy. The service is integrated with Google Search History. On the 23 January 2006 Google News graduated from beta to become a fully fledged Google service.

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Page Creator

Main article: Google Page Creator

* Google Page Creator

Google introduced a beta release of a web-publishing program which creates pages and hosts them on Google's servers. You must have a GMail or GoogleMail Account to use this service. It offers 100 MB of free storage space and you can upload htm and html files your site even if they have been made in other programs.

The URL given to members is http://gmailusername.googlepages.com/

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Personalized Home

Formerly Portal or Google Fusion

* Google Personalized Home

In May 2005, Google introduced Personalized Homepage, giving the ability to customize the default Google home page. In order to use the Google service, the user must first have a Google account, although these accounts are distinct from Gmail and do not require invitation. It allows users to have a homepage customized to their taste with, among other things, Google Search, an at-a-glance headline view of top stories from numerous websites including Slashdot and CNN, as well as offering your local weather. The user can select certain items to appear on their portal. Preselected news feeds can be chosen, or customized RSS feeds can be used. Among available pre-determined feeds are the BBC, CNN and Slashdot along with many others. On 14 September 2005, Google moved the homepage out of Google Labs. The "IG" in the address stands for "I Google".

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Personalized Search

* Google Personalized Search

By making use of Google's Search History feature, this service allows users to create a profile based on their prior search history. Future search results can be prioritized on an individual basis on the information collected.

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Scholar

* Google Scholar

In November 2004, Google released Google Scholar, a search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and scholarly fields. Today, the index includes virtually all peer-reviewed journals available online, except those published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. Comparable in function to Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's subscription-based Web of Science service, though more inclusive in sources and languages.

Results in Google Scholar are ranked by "relevance", which is based largely on the number of times the scholarly works have been cited in other works and in this sense is similar to PageRank. The relevance ranking is biased towards older works rather than up-to-date works which have had less time to be cited. Google Scholar appears to be strongly based on the ideas behind Citeseer, as described in the paper Digital Libraries and Autonomous Citation Indexing [5]. "Stand on the shoulders of giants" appears as a motto on the Google scholar main page.

During early 2005, Google Scholar was enhanced by the first attempt by a search engine to directly link its users to online resources at research libraries. Initially known as the Institutional Access Pilot, now Library Links, the service enables institutional users, primarily at major academic libraries, to identify their institutional affiliation and thereby receive customized search results that link to their institution's link resolver, thus ensuring they receive access to a document's full text.

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Search History

Formerly My Search History

* Search History

Keeps a record of all searches and clicked results while a user is logged into a Google Account and allows this to be accessed and searched. This also tracks queries made to Google Images and Google News. Recently, Google expanded Search History with a new feature, dubbed Trends, that allows users to view detailed statistics based on the data in their search history. [6]

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Special Searches

* [http://www.google.com/options/specialse

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Trends

Main article: Google Trends

* Google Trends

Google says that "Google Trends builds on the idea behind the Google Zeitgeist, allowing you to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries." The service was publicized on 10 May 2006.

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Video

Main article: Google Video

* Google Video

Google Video is a free Google service that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge or commercially through the Google Video Store. Users can search and play videos directly from Google Video, as well as download video files and remotely embed them on their webpages

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Features

Calculator

Explanation:

* http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html

Examples (the link texts are what is entered as if it were a search string):

* 12*13

* 0x23 in decimal

* 40 in hexadecimal

* (1+i)*(2+i)

* 212 F in C

* 1.21 gigawatts / 88 mph

* the speed of light in miles / s

* the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight

* the speed of light in knots

* the speed of light in light years per year

* days in a year

* two plus two

* au/c (Astronomical Unit / the speed of light)

* m_earth (with underscore)

* r_earth (with underscore)

* G

* 1-0.9-0.1 = −2.77555756 × 10−17 (Floating point#Problems with floating-point floating point math error)[7] (Fixed as of 00:34, 6 February 2006 (UTC))

* kibibyte in bytes

* kbit/s in bit/s = 1,024 bit/second (binary prefix error — kbit/s always means 1000 bit/s, unlike kilobyte, which is ambiguous)

* the answer to life, the universe, and everything (see The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything)

* 1/once in a blue moon

* R_infinity (Rydberg constant) (with underscore)

* Phi_0 Magnetic flux quantum (with underscore)

Currency Conversion

* Explanation

Examples (the link texts are what is entered as if it were a search string):

* 1.5 LTL in EUR

* 100 Chilean peso in Brazilian real

* 2 Euros per liter in British pounds per Imperial pint

Definitions

Enables users to have a word or string (phrase) defined from definitions found in online references (including wiki sites). Explanation

* Definition of cat.

* Definition of Purple Rain.

* Definition of George Washington.

Hurricane Katrina On September 12, 2005, Google added two new search features designed specificially for finding information about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. The first is Katrina People Search that can help one search multiple databases of information regarding friends and family affected by the hurricane. The second feature is a Special Index Search on Katrina related pages.

* Official Google Hurricane Katrina search tools (Redirects to main search page as of February 6, 2006)

Movies

Allows users in the USA and Canada to search for info about movies using the main Google search interface. You can search in various ways:

* Entering "movie: 10001" in the Google "search text" entry field will search for all movies being shown in and around United States zipcode 10001- sorted by movie theater. Within the listing you can see showtimes, the average rating for each movie, as well as links to all reviews, and a link to the IMDB page for that movie.

* Entering "movie: movies 10001" provides a listing sorted by movie, showing all locations and showtimes where each movie is shown in the area.

* Entering "movie: Julia Roberts" provides a listing sorted by movie, of many of the movies starring this actor/actress. It is unclear what rules/algorithm is used for including/excluding certain movies.

* Google Movies

Music "Google Music" is a service launched on December 15, 2005. The new service is not going to be a music library, such as Yahoo’s. The service will search libraries of legal download services and will provide links to the partners, as well as lyrics and biographies of the artist. Initial merchant partners include Apple Computer's iTunes service, RealNetworks's Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon.com and WalMart.com, Google said. Google also said that this does not represent Google moving to be an online music retailer.

The way the service is used is by simply typing in the name of a popular band and searching from the standard home page, the engine will return specialized results at the top of the results similar to "Google AdSense".

* Google Music website

PhoneBook

This search feature is built into Google's standard search bar; if the search terms match certain criteria, an option to view search results of Google's telephone directory archive is provided. One can search both residential and business listings. There is also an option available to remove one's phone book entry from Google.

* Google PhoneBook results for Google, Inc.

Weather Allows users in the USA to get a four-day forecast for a particular U.S. locations using the main Google search interface.

* Palo Alto weather

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Tools

Blogger

Main article: Blogger

Blogger website In 2003, Google acquired the Pyra Labs and Blogger services. Formerly premium features that needed to be paid for were made available for free by Google. The tool, Blogger, is a service to make weblog publishing easier. The user does not have to write any code or worry about installing server software or scripts. Nevertheless, the user can influence the design of their blog freely.

Calendar Released April 13th, 2006. Many features come with Google Calendar such as:

* Sharing calendars with other Google users

* Publicizing your Calendar showing "Busy" or "Available" times without giving away private details.

* The ability to import or export existing calendars to/from Microsoft Outlook or other common calendar programs.

* Google Calendar website

Code Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related development. The site contains Open Source code and lists of their API services.

* Google Code website

Gmail

Main article: Gmail (known in some areas as 'Google Mail')

On April 1, 2004, Google announced its own free webmail service, Gmail, which would provide users with 1000 MB (actually 1 GB, or 1024 MB) of storage for their mailboxes and would generate revenue by displaying advertisements from the AdWords service based on words in users email messages. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release was greeted with much skepticism in the technology world. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, re-assured BBC News by saying "We are very serious about Gmail."

When Gmail was announced, the storage space available was vastly more than that of most other free webmail providers—for example, Microsoft's Hotmail only offered 2 MB, and Yahoo!'s Mail service offered 4 MB. (In response to Gmail, Yahoo's limits have been upgraded to 250 MB and then again, to 1 GB for their free accounts, and 2 GB for their premium account; Hotmail's limits have been upgraded to 250 MB for their free accounts, and 2 GB for their premium account.) There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy. Most of the criticism was over Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to emails by automatically scanning them. Google continues to refute some of this criticism by pointing out that GMail is using mostly industry wide practices. [8]

On April 1, 2005 Google announced that they would begin constantly increasing mailbox size by approximately 1 MB every 75 seconds, with no plan to stop. This actually was an April Fool's joke, but the company did simultaneously announce that it was increasing mailbox size to 2 GB, with a promise to add more space in the future. They are continuously adding more space, much slower than during April 1. On their webpage, they show how much space they are currently providing. By April 11, Google was adding storage at approximately 3.5 MB each day.

Although Google's Gmail is still in beta testing, and not open to the general public, users who do have an account have 5 (new users) to 100 (older users) "Gmail invites" that they can send to others. The number of invites a person has regenerates over time.

Gmail was anticipated to go open to the general public in early 2006. Although Google has not yet set an official date for open admittance, any person in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Turkey, and the United States with a cell phone capable of text messaging can now sign up without an invite from a current user at https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1.

On February 7, 2006, Google announced they are currently adding Google Talk support into Gmail. This allows you to send instant messages to other talk users directly from your Gmail inbox. Many users already have access to this update and the integration is slowly being rolled over for those who don't.

Language Tools

This tool allows users to translate text or web pages from one language to another. It also allows searching in web pages located in a specific country or written in a specific language.

* Google Language Tools website

Measure Map

Measure Map provides statistics for user blogs.

Orkut

Main article: Orkut

Though not mentioned on the Google homepage, orkut is a service hosted, created and maintained by Google engineers. Orkut is a social networking service, where users can list their personal and professional information, create relationships amongst friends and join communities of mutual interest. New Orkut accounts are by invite only from an existing member. Affinity Engines, a company based in Palo Alto, has filed a lawsuit alleging that their co-founder Orkut Büyükkökten illegally re-used Affinity Engines software code when he moved to Google. [9]

* orkut

Reader

Main article: Google Reader

Google Reader logo

On October 7th 2005, Google launched Google Reader, a feed reader, or "news aggregator", capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. Google Reader is accessed through a web browser and features an interface similar to Gmail. It allows you to subscribe to feeds by URL, import/export subscription lists using OPML, and search for new feeds. The service also embeds audio enclosures in the page. To add a "Add to Google Reader" Button with 1-click subscriptions to your webpage visit the link below.

* Google Reader

Sitemaps

Main article: Google Sitemaps

In June 2005 Google released the Google Sitemaps tool into beta testing. Google Sitemaps allows Webmasters to generate a file that lists the URLs on the site in order for better indexing of the website. Google makes no promises about increasing PageRank with this tool, but it allows the Webmaster to get some feedback on the URLs that Google is searching.

Web API

The Google Web API (or Google Web Services) is Google's public interface for registered developers. Using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a programmer can write services for search and data mining that rely on Google's results. Also, websurfers can view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.

By default a developer has a limit of 1,000 requests per day. This program is still in a beta phase. Google is one of the few search engines to make its results available via a public API; Technorati is another good example. Some popular implementations of the Google Web API include the alerting service Google Alerts, or FindForward, as well as the Google Dance Tool, which monitors when Google is spidering the Internet.

* Google Web API website

Writely

Main article: Writely

On March 9, 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, the maker of online word-processor Writely. It is still in beta and is not available to new users as of yet.

* Writely website

* Writely blog

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Downloads

Google Pack

Main article: Google Pack

Google Pack, announced at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show on 6 January 2006, bundles Google (Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Desktop, etc.) and non-Google software (such as Adobe Reader, Norton Antivirus and Trillian) into a single setup.

Deskbar

In December 2003, Google launched the beta version of the Google Deskbar, a search tool which runs from the Microsoft Windows taskbar, without a browser having to be open. It can return film reviews, stock quotes, dictionary and thesaurus definitions, plus any pre-configured search of a third-party site (e.g. eBay or Amazon). In November 2004, Google launched an API for Google Deskbar.

* Google Deskbar website

Desktop

Main article: Google Desktop

Google Desktop enables desktop search. It runs locally on a PC and will index all Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, and Thunderbird emails, text documents, Microsoft Office documents, AOL Instant Messenger conversations, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and Netscape history on that PC, PDF, music, images, video, and allow the user to search them from a browser.

Google Desktop 2 (beta) was released on August 22, 2005. The new feature that distinguishes Desktop 2 from Desktop is the addition of Sidebar which is placed on either side of your Windows desktop and can display real-time news, e-mail, photos, stocks, and weather, among others.

On November 3, 2005, Google "graduated" Desktop from beta. ([10])

* Google Desktop website

Earth

Main article: Google Earth

Screenshot from Google Earth

Enlarge

Screenshot from Google Earth

On June 28, 2005, Google made available Google Earth as a downloadable program for free. It uses Keyhole technology to allow customized use of Google Maps, with e.g. map images with town and street names overlaying satellite images. For some areas these overlays are available even though Google Maps by itself does not provide these.

* Google Earth website

Hello

Main article: Hello (application)

This add-on to Google's software Picasa gives the user the ability to instant message pictures and to surf the web in a shared form: two users instant messaging can surf the web together. It also allows a user to directly add pictures from Picasa to his/her blog on blogger. This is the first instant messaging download offered by Google.

* Hello

Picasa

Main article: Picasa

On July 13, 2004 Google acquired Picasa, software for management and sharing of digital photographs. Since then, Google has released the latest edition of the software with Picasa2. The aim of the software was to make photo editing simple and easy to use. Picasa has also been integrated with Google's Blogger and Gmail services. It is free to download.

* picasa

SketchUp

Main Article: SketchUp

On Tuesday March 16th 2006, Google acquired @Last Software, makers of a 3D modelling software called SketchUp. The software is still available through the SketchUp Website for a fee, although a trial version is available for download.

On Thursday April 27th 2006, Google released a free version 5.0.245 of SketchUp for Windows, on their website, promising a Mac version soon. There is also a Pro version available for a price ($495).

* Download Page

Talk

Main Article: Google Talk

On August 24, 2005, a beta version of Talk was released. It is an instant messaging service, utilizing the Jabber protocol. Talk also includes a voice over ip service.

On February 7, 2006, Google announced they are currently adding Talk support into Gmail. This allows you to send instant messages to other talk users directly from your gmail inbox. Many users already have access to this update and the integration is slowly being rolled over for those who don't.

* Google Talk website

Toolbar

Google Toolbar is a toolbar featuring a Google search bar, as well as other Google tools. As of July 2005, Google Toolbar is available for two browsers, four operating systems and in ten languages.

This addition to Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later adds Google's searching capabilities in a toolbar in the web browser. The latest version includes pop-up ads blocking, automatic filling of forms, the ability to show the Google PageRank value for the current page being viewed, and spell checker, AutoLink and the Word Translator. It has been criticized for being a security risk because it updates itself without user intervention.

A separately downloadable add-on for the toolbar allowed participation in Google Compute, a distributed computing project to help scientific research. This add-on is currently not available.

Other browsers, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari, have built-in search tools that offer the same functionality. Google also has a version of the toolbar, Google Toolbar for Firefox, which functions similarly to its Internet Explorer counterpart, except it has exclusive Firefox-only features. There is also the well established Googlebar List of Firefox extensions extension, which although not developed by Google directly offers very similar functionality to the official Google Toolbar.

In January 2006, Google released the beta version of its new toolbar, Google Toolbar Beta, for Windows XP/2000 and IE 6.0+ which allows users to get instant search suggestions; share web pages with friends; enjoy the Toolbar's pop-up blocker, web form filler, and spellchecker; add bookmarks; and add custom buttons. Google Custom Button Gallery

Enlarge

Then, in April 2006, Google released Google Toolbar 2 for Firefox for Windows XP/2000, Mac OS X, or Red Hat Linux and Firefox 1.0+. Additions included an "enhanced search box" and a new "safe browsing" anti-phishing feature. [11]

Toolbar trivia

The about dialog box for Google Toolbar has the Latin words "de parvis grandis acervus erit"

Check

Other

Google Store

The Google Store is an online store with clothing, mouse pads, and other items with the Google logo on it. They also have their software to download. On some items, they also have the logos of other services, like Blogger.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_services_and_tools

1 comment:

Joseph said...

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