Top 10 Google Products You May Not Have Heard About


Google’s quest for total web domination over the last couple of years has produced an army of helpful and successful products, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Earth and more. And while Google’s most successful products get a ton of press, they also have a huge list of lesser-known products that deserve a shout-out or two. Below is a list of the top 10 you may not have heard about.

Google Lattitude
Google Lattitude is a geolocation application that allows anyone with a mobile phone to allow people from his/her Gmail contact list to track where he or she is on Google Maps through iGoogle accounts. Released in February 2009, users can control the accuracy and detail of what each other individual user can see by allowing either an exact location or limiting it to city only. Locations can also be manually entered or turned off by the user. To use it, just enable the location features on your mobile phone. Although not yet available on the iPhone or iPod touch (although those are coming soon), Google Lattitude is compatible with Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1, most color BlackBerry devices, most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices and most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones).

Google SketchUp
Google SketchUp is a 3D modeling program designed for archtects, civil engineers, filmmakers, web and game developers and other related professions. Designed to be easier to use than other 3D programs, one of its prominent features is 3D Warehouse, which allows SketchUp users to search for models made by other users and contribute their own. The models can also be placed on Google Earth. The free version supports Ruby scripts and features a toolbox where users can walk, create labels, see things from other people’s point of view, a “look around” tool and an “any polygon” shape tool.

Google App Engine
App Engine is a platform that allows developers to write and run web applications in Google-managed data centers. Released in April 2008, App Engine is a free cloud computing technology that supports programming languages like Python and Java. App Engine provides more infrastructure to make it easier for developers to write scalable applications. Every application created in App Engine has enough CPU, bandwidth and storage to support around 5 million page views.

Google Transit
Google Transit is a service that calculates route, transit time and cost for hundreds of cities in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. It can also compare a public transportation trip to one using a car. As of October 2007, the service is fully integrated into Google Maps.

Orkut
Orkut is Google’s version of a social networking service designed to help users meet new friends and maintain relationships. Although Orkut is dominated by Facebook in the US, it is extremely popular in Brazil and India. In fact, almost 50% of users on the site are from Brazil. Users can create scrapbooks, rate their friends as trustworthy, cool or sexy on a scale of 1 to 3, create a “Crush List” and optional profile restrictions.

Knol
Knol is a service owned by Google that allows subject experts and other users to write authoritative articles on various topics. As of January 2009, Knol had grown to 100,000 articles with users from 197 countries visiting on an average day. Google defines “knol” as a unit of knowledge and the pages are “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

Gears
Gears is a free and open source browser plug-in software offered by Google that allows developers to create off-line browser applications. It’s supported by Chrome, FireFox, IE6+ and Safari, and a slew of web applications, including Google and MySpace.

Google FriendConnect
Google FriendConnect is an online service that allows website and blog owners to add social features to their websites and connect with friends on different websites. It’s an Open Social application that focuses on simplifying the connection between social and non-social websites. It’s free, doesn’t require web programming knowledge and allows any website to offer social applications and content from numerous social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Google Talk and more.

Google Health
Google Health is a free personal health information service that enables users to keep their health records organized in one place. Users can submit information about health conditions, medications, allergies and lab results and then Google Health creates a merged health record that provides information on conditions and possible drug interactions. Google Health can currently import medical information from a host of health insurance and medical facilities. Click here to see a list.

Google Squared
Google Squared creates tables of information about a subject from completely unstructured data. It’s a semantic search product that marks Google’s first big effort to understand information on the web and present it in new ways. Data is extracted from across the web and presented in a spreadsheet format. Each search query returns a table of search results with its own set of columns divided into comminalities associated with the topic search.

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