Google Services
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia
Services
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.
Answers
In April 2002, Google launched a new service called Google
Answers. It is an extension to the conventional search — rather than doing
the search themselves, users pay someone else to do the search. Customers
ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them.
Researchers are screened through an application process that tests their
research and communications abilities. Prices for questions range from $2 to
$200; Google keeps 25% of the payment, sends the rest to the researchers,
and charges an additional $0.50 listing fee. Once a question is answered, it
remains available for anyone to browse for free. This service came out of
beta in May 2003 and presently receives more than one hundred question
postings per day. Google states that asking questions about Google is not
allowed on Google Answers. It is similar to the earlier Experts Exchange,
but has a broader scope and the barriers of entry to ask or answer are
higher.
Base
Google Base was officially
launched in beta on November 16, 2005, but was already live 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.
Blog Search
On September 14 2005, Google launched Blog Search. It is
Google search technology focused on blogs. Your results include all blogs,
not just those published through Blogger as their
blog index is continually updated. You can search not just for blogs written
in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean,
Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.
There are different ways you can get to Blog Search:
Book Search
Formerly Google Print
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. 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. .
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. 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. Its program for publishers and authors for
including 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'.
External Links:
Catalogs
As of December 2005, 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.
Directory
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 original source of the directory, and the categorization is the
Open Directory Project (ODP), which publishes an easily parsed version of
its database in Resource Description Framework format for other sites, like
Google, to use for derivative directories.
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.
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.
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.
Labs
Main article: 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.
Local
Google Local helps you focus your search on a specific
geographic location. Sometimes you want to search the whole worldwide web,
and sometimes you just want to find an auto parts store within walking
distance. The service lets you search for a "What" such as pizza and a
"Where" such as Poughkeepsie, New York. The purpose of Google Local is to
help people find local businesses. Not only does Google Local display the
website of the businesses, but often times it will also display the phone
number and address. On October 6, 2005 Google integrated Google
Maps functionality into its Local service. 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.
Main article: 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 whole world in June 2005.
Mobile
Allows users to search using Google from wireless devices
such as mobile phone and PDAs.
Moon
Main article: Google Moon
On July 20, 2005, in honor of the first manned Moon landing on the 20 July
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 cheese."
Main article: 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.
Personalized Homepage
Formerly Portal or Google Fusion
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. 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".
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.
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 Science, the world's
largest scientific publisher. Comparable in function to Elsevier's Scopus
and Thomson ISI's subscription-based Web of Science service, through more
inclusive in sources and languages, Google Scholar is the world's largest
index of the "Deep Web" or content that is only available to entitled users.
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 . "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.
Search History
Formerly My 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.
Special Searches
Allows users to perform special searches such as U.S.
Government Search, Linux Search, BSD Search, Apple Macintosh Search, and a
Microsoft Windows Search.
Use text messaging for quick info.
Suggest
A new feature called Google Suggest was introduced on
December 10, 2004. It provides an autocomplete functionality that gives the
user suggestions as they type. JavaScript is used to rapidly query the
server and update the page for each keystroke that the user types.
The feature quickly drew widespread praise as an impressive innovation, and
so far competitors such as Yahoo! have not offered anything similarly
real-time. Some in the open-source community, however, have made an effort
to duplicate the functionality for general use, and we may one day see many
ordinary sites employing this type of interface. The term AJAX has come into
widespread use to describe the technology used in Google Suggest and
GMail. Suggest Framework is an example of this
effort.
It has been noted that Google attempts to avoid suggesting potentially
offensive searches. For instance, there are no suggestions for porn, but
there are for variations of the word. Interestingly, other words, like
lesbian are also on this list, while various profanities and racial slurs
are not.
See also WikiWax, a comparable service from SurfWax Inc. that searches
Wikipedia articles.
See also Questsin, a blog explaining how Google Suggest Works as an
algorithm including negative side effects of simple concatenating words
together based on frequency of results.
Currently in Google Labs, the
Google Transit Trip Planner was released
on December 7, 2005 (). Google Transit's
goal is to provide local trip planning (eg, using the local buses and rail
system) in a simplistic manner, all on one page. Utilizing the Google
Maps interface, transit shows a picture of
your route with detailed directions.
Google Transit currrently works only in
the Portland, Oregon area but will be expanded soon.
A translation service launched by Google, see Google
Translate
University Search
Allows users to search within a large number of educational institution
domains.
Video
Main article: Google Video
On January 25, 2005, Google introduced a beta of
Google Video, allowing users to search through television content based
on title, network or a closed caption transcript. Users can then watch the
videos, or in most cases see stills and transcripts of them.
Web Search
Main article: Google (search
engine)
Google's most famous creation is the Google
search engine. Google.com has indexed over 8 billion Web sites, has 200
million requests a day and is the largest
search engine on the Internet. The search
engine allows you to search through images, products (Froogle),
news, and the usenet archive. It uses a proprietary system (including
PageRank) to return the search results. A
culture has grown around the very popular
search engine, and to google has come to mean, "to search for something
on Google."
X
Main article: Google X
Google X was a project released by
Google Labs on March 15, 2005 and rescinded a
day later. It consisted of the traditional Google search bar, but it was
made to look like the Dock user interface feature of Apple's Mac OS X
operating system. Rumors say the project was discontinued because Google
feared legal retribution from Apple.
Google Guide made by MultiMedia | Free content and software
This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
|
Our Services
Members
Site News
Tools
Manual's
And our Forums with