14 Google Project You May Have Never Heard Of…But You Should!
14 Cool Google Labs Projects You Should Know
Google News Timeline is a powerful tool that organizes information from Google News and other sources in a chronological manner. Navigation through time periods, specific dates and time scales (such as days, weeks, months, years or decades) is possible just by specifying what the user desires.
This feature offers results from a variety of archives, newspapers, magazines, blog posts and sports scores (music and movies); you can also search under particular criteria such as: TV shows, news, books, movies, etc., and can even consult websites like Wikipedia and Twitter.
Search engine developed by Google that catalogs patents and patents applications from the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office); they are extracted from the original USPTO database and include all US patents and their public applications and are ranked according to their relevance to a given search query (which is determined algorithmically).
To this day, this database does not include international patents, though they look to expand their coverage in the future.
“In Quotes” is a Google Labs feature that allows users to find quotes from stories linked to Google News; these quotations are useful when evaluating information from different individuals about particular topics, where they stand on various issues.
Browsers can compare quotes from a wide range of famous people; mainly political candidates and other political figures. A variety of topics, countries and queries are available for use, also, there’s a “Spin” feature that lets quotes rotate providing two new ones for you to compare.
Google Moderator is a Google service named after the fish Dory, who asked questions all the time in “Finding Nemo”, that uses crowdsourcing to rank-submitted questions, suggestions and ideas and provides users the opportunity to vote up the inquiries that they wish to have answered and lets the audience see others’ questions. It basically lets browsers manage feedback from a large number of people.
City Tours is a Google Labs feature that puts Google in the tourism business. Users can enter city names or specific addresses and it will suggest sights for travelers to see around that area altogether with their estimated arriving time, distance, hot spots and their exact locations, etc.; it basically maps out a multi-day itinerary and proposes travel schedules for you to follow, which can come in handy when visiting an unfamiliar city.
Maps can be imported and used afterwards, when the actual trip takes place. It has a wide number of cities in its database that goes far beyond the world’s most famous cities.
Google Audio Indexing, also known as “Gaudi” was a Google Labs widget where users were able to search through videos (like the ones available in YouTube.com) by analyzing the audio content on them, with top-notch speech-to-text technology.
Searches can take place globally or within a single video; the dedicated site also offered more features such as “search within video” and “sharing”, and they were constantly trying to renovate it with new attributes and a more robust interface.
Google Code Search is a free beta Google Labs application that is used to search for open-source codes on the Internet. Users can search for a regular expression, exact strings, class and function name, files or directory matching or languages matching other languages; by using specific operators.
It is a great tool for web developers and programmers; one of its downsides, however, is that it provides an open window to people looking for sinister bodies of information as they keep uncovering syntaxes that otherwise wouldn’t be explored.
Image Swirl is a Google Labs experiment which organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface; as users keep on clicking an image more and more results will come up. This lets you explore the clusters and the relation between images and discover new sub-groups within any cluster as well as establish hierarchies out of these groups.
To this moment, Google Image Swirl clusters the top image search results for more than 200,000 queries and is constantly expanding.
- similar-images.googlelabs.com
Similar Images is another experimental service from Google Labs that lets users find images that are similar to the image they are looking for; this feature allows them to search for pictures, using pictures themselves rather than words.
Images are not allowed to be uploaded; instead, Google lets you search the web for images, choose one of the results and then click on “Similar Images” according to previous search criteria.
Fast Flip is a part of Google Labs that lets users flip through articles as fast as they would do it with real paper, it combines the best elements of print and online articles.
You browse contents sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, and since you can do it pretty fast, you can stop at anytime when you find something that interests you.
At the same time, this service includes information from many top newspapers and magazines, which can also be shared with family and friends, who can send you back their recommendations for you to read.
Google Scholar is a free web search engine that indexes full texts of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines; it includes the largest scholarly publishers and allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.
Scholarly searches appear using references from full-text journal articles, technical reports, theses, books, etc. And advance search option is also available and it comes in handy when trying to narrow search result to an specific journal or article.
Google Product Search is a price comparison service launched by Google Inc. and which does not charge any fees for listings, accepts payments for products to shop or take commissions on sales.
Its interface lets the user type product queries and returns lists of vendors selling a particular product as well as pricing information; this feature is only available for selected countries at this point, however, they plan to expand their horizons as time goes by. In the United States, any company can submit individual product information via Google Base or can bulk submit items for inclusion.
Google Trends is an initiative of Google Inc., that lets users inquire how often a particular search item is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world and in various languages.
Graphics have two axis; the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally; also, very interesting statistics are provided, such as popularity broken down by region, city and language.
- people-hopper.googlelabs.com
Orkut application and interactive feature that lets users take a profile image and “morph” it into a friend’s – using publicly available images from other Orkut users along the way; browsers can also “morph” their friends’ pictures into someone else’s.
There should be no worries when it comes to privacy, since users that have set their profile to be public are the ones whose pictures will appear in the morphing process. It is a fun application that allows you to make new connections and share graphs between friends.
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