New Google Services Announced

Tryllekunstner writes "The guys at the Google Press Center presented upcoming Google technologies at a press conference. Google Co-op beta is a community where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. Google Trends builds on the Google Zeitgeist to help users find facts and trends related to Google usage around the world. Google Notebook is a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from the pages they're browsing, save them to an online 'notebook' that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others. Also, Google Desktop 4 is also mentioned." Googleblog has an outline of the new services.

Comments

Next up...

[Xichekolas]

Googledot... an online community that allows technology users to comment on recent technology and political news. Also, a place to announce new Google beta tools.

I like Google and all... but can they please focus on creating something useful like a payment system rather than sites that offer fancy copy-and-paste functionality?

Not useful

[slusich]

Most of these are things I'd never use, with the exception of Notebook.
I'm looking forward to that app, as I'm constantly scribbling notes when doing research on the web. As long as the implementation is decent then it's something I'll use nearly every day. It's probably the only app that most people would find any use for. The others are cool in a geeky kind of way, but nothing I'd probably ever even look at.

Re:No Thanks

[w.p.richardson]

Think of it as an employment application. I am sure that if you provided something meritorious that either Google or someone else would provide you with a chance for something gainful. Not bad if you are a student with a bit of time on your hands...

Whats the point?

[rossdee]

" Google Notebook is a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online."

I dont see the need for an online text editor. Why not use on your own machine? Its faster, and your thoughts are (mostly) private.

Re:Whats the point?

[Cliff.Braun]

I have to write a bunch of papers and at various times I end up in, say, a library away from my own machine, I can email myself links, but that's clumsy and a pain in the ass. If this worked well I'd be all over it, I move around too much for a normal clipboard. Another thing would be nice is when i am working with someone and in order to pass a url I just point them to the google page we've been using all day rather then trying to email or dictate. I just wish it was out this week, by next week I won't need it for a few months.

Re:Whats the point?

[.com b4 .storm]

Accessibility from anywhere, and the possibilities of collaboration - those are the key draws to something like this. I'm a university student, and I organize pretty much all of my work online using Backpack, and write most of my short papers with Writely. There's computers all over campus, and at work, so no matter where I am, I have my projects with me. Plus both of those sites allow for collaboration with people when I need it.

Sure, I could carry stuff around on a USB drive (and for critical things where I can't rely on there being net access, I do so). Then you've got the issue of whether a given program is installed, or whether I'm allowed to use the drive (some public terminals on campus do not allow you to use USB drives, since they're strictly for checking e-mail and the like).

For 'mobile' people, having your data online and manageable on there is very attractive. With the exception of very elaborate work like research papers and such, pretty much everything I do for my classes is kept online somewhere.

Kewl

[infradead]

Google Co-op beta is a community where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone.

So they're going to start eliminating blatant spam when it's reported? Kewl!

Re:A good tool.

[wandm]

I'll second that! I'm hooked to Trends already..

I immediately searched for "sex", what else. And voila!

The leading countries are nearly all islamic, strict & ultraconservative.

They know what they need over there..

Re:Search for NASA

[Otter]

There's obviously something wrong there -- compare the results for cities and regions. Unless rural Colombians and Turks are absolutely obsessed with NASA, I don't see how those rankings could possibly both be accurate. (The spike in Mexico City is South Park-related, I'd guess...?)

Re:A good tool.

[IntlHarvester]

I'm thinking that most OS searches are caused by technical support issues or problem solving, so it's not necessarily a good thing to have a high score.

Given that, Linux very high relative to the size of it's installed base. Which makese sense because idiots like me can't get anything done in Linux without 1000 google searches.

Re:Tibet

[D H NG]

Yeah, the number of people in China using those English terms to search must be overwhelming.

What I don't like about Google Co-op

[The Pim]

Way back when they started, what was Google's killer insight? That there was information out there on the Web (the link structure) that could be used to improve search results. What's the premise of Google co-op? That people will feed information to Google that can be used to improve search results. See the big difference? In the first case, the information is public, and generated as a side-effect of making the Web more useful generally (by creating helpful links); in the second, the information is owned by Google, and only Google can make use of it directly.

It doesn't have to be this way: Google could have told people how to publish this information themselves, on their web pages. It certainly has the ability to scrounge data from myriad sites. This way, more uses could be made of the information: browsers could display it, other search engines could build it into their results, and anyone could build a novel application (you could imagine this being what makes the semantic web take off). I would argue that not only is Google being selfish with their design, but ultimately making the wrong choice for themselves, because the more useful information is, the more of it people will generate.

The same criticism holds for Google Base.