Google press day announcements…
It looks as though Google has made a bit of a splash with four product announcements today. Nothing being EXACTLY as forecast it is a bit interesting…. First there is Google Coop where it looks as though people in specific fields can help suggest, review and refine results (like a directory), then users subscribe to an individual who has labelled sites. This is the area that Google Health falls under and there are a couple areas that are “Under development”. This gives some interesting possibilities for refining searches in certain areas.
There’s Google Trends which can correlate search volume for specific terms with news volume for those terms. It looks as though you can break down and see what popular terms there are for specific languages or regions. This looks very interesting. I’ve seen this interface before I think in one of the zeitgeist publications… it’s currently a Google Labs branded item….
There’s also Google Desktop 4… from Google Blogoscoped
Another new product today is Google Desktop in version 4 with “Google Gadgets.” The official Google Desktop blog calls these “visually appealing mini-applications like clocks, weather globes, media players, etc., that support rich markup language (XML, Flash) and enable a wide array of visual effects and animation.”
According to a Google press release, GD4 also enables sharing of gadgets and settings between different computers, and backing it up online. Plus, you can now put modules from the Google
And finally there is a product which we won’t see for another week…. Perhaps will be at this link…. Google Notebook Which will give a window that will “follow” from the search results to a site that you can clip and paste text/images into. The notebooks will be share-able as well.
This last one sounds great from the standpoint of collaborating on research…. That seems to be it. Hopefully I’ve got the gist of each of those.
I’m curious to take a closer look at the trends….. More coverage here, and here, and from the official google blog.
The trends by the way, is already being put to good use in such things as the Firefox vs. IE popularity contest.