Google’s Other Features
Host | 13 December 2004 | Comments Off
What Does Google Have to Offer Besides Search Results?
Heather Austin, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
The most popular features offered by Google beyond regular search results are image search, news search, Froogle (their shopping search), and now their desktop search released in October 2004. See Blizzard’s article on the desktop search in our October Newsletter.
Google also has a few newer features still in the beta testing stage that we’d like to share: Google Scholar, Google Groups, and Google Alerts. They also have purchased a very cool piece of software called Keyhole.
Google Scholar allows you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. You can also use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. The search results are based on relevance of text in the article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.
Google Groups is portal for discussion groups. You can create, search and browse groups to discuss and share ideas.
Google Alerts will send you e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. After a simple and quick registration, you can submit keyword phrase(s) to be searched on a daily or weekly basis, or as the news occurs. Reasons to make use of Google Alerts include monitoring a developing story, staying updated on a competitor, getting the latest news on an event, or keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams, to name a few!
Keyhole offers software that allows you to see images around the world through satellite imagery. They like to think of it as a magic carpet ride through your desktop. The cost is $29.95 for a one year personal edition, and as much as $599 for a one year professional edition. A monthly or yearly subscription will apply after the first year due to the need for satellite images to be constantly updated. Check out the seven day free trial!
While these are just some of the newer features offered by Google, more can be found on the Google Services page. I think we are safe to say that we can expect more to come, too!
