Google always surprise us with their amazing products. They offer us keyword search, image search, video search, Maps, Gmail and many other services. If you take a look at the list of Google products you will be amazed by the wide area that they are covering, not only online, but also desktop applications, mobile applications, enterprise solutions and even hardware. If you go out and do a general research among your friends, you will realize that most of them are only using very few Google services and only general features of them. They are not aware of most of the amazing, yet totally free Google products and their fine features. This article will take a look in to 5 amazing Google products and their fine features.
Image Search
I’m pretty sure that most of your friends have used Google Images search. Easy way to access it is do a normal search and change it to image search from top bar or side bar. Once you go to image search it will display thumbnails of images indexed from many web pages, which makes Google image search world’s largest image hug. Using the side bar you can narrow down your result by image size and time.
The main problem in many other search engines is that they don’t actually recognize the content of the image. They just read the ‘title’ and ‘alt’ tags and list the image. This is where Google image search makes a difference. It actually looks in to the image and identify some content of the image for indexing. Therefore you can search image for color.
Ex: You search for “BMW 320i” and then select “Red” color from the sidebar. See the result, it will give what exactly you are looking for.
Then you can narrow down your search by image type. Here again Google image search look in to image and identify the content, whether it’s a face, photo, clip art or line drawing. Try to narrow down the search with type “face” and take a look. You will be amazed by the accuracy of the filtering algorithm.
So far we were using keywords to find images. But Google Image search works the other way around too. You can upload an image, and then it will look for it in the web. To proceed with that you have to go to Google Image home page and click on the camera icon in the search box. It will ask you to upload the image, then it will show you the places where the uploaded image appears on the web. Furthermore it looks in to the image content and present you the visually similar images as well. Same as in the previous case, the image recognition and indexing algorithm works perfectly. To make it easier to use Google image search you can add a description to image as well.
There is a mobile application which allows you to take a photograph using your mobile smart phone and upload it to image search easily, named Google Goggles. You can find more information about the application here. It’s again using the same algorithm to identify the image content and do the search based on that.
Video Search
Google Video search is also commonly used as same as Google Image search, yet its fine features are rarely used by general users. Easiest way to access the video search is do a general keyword search and change the result in to videos using top bar or side bar or Google Video home page.
Any Google search support Voice Search and you can use the same to image or video search. All you have to do is click on the microphone icon in the search box and speak what you need to search to the attached microphone. It will convert that to text and do the search for you.
If you don’t like matured content in your image or video search result you can switch on the “Safe Search” using the drop down menu at the top right side of search result. You can make the safe search strict or moderate according to your requirements.
Google video search doesn’t recognize the content in the videos like image search. Yet, it gives you the facility to narrow down your search result using upload time, duration of the video, quality and source website.
By clicking on the thumbnail of the video you can directly go to source website and enjoy the video.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a very special type of search engine which index Academic papers submitted by scholars all around the world. This might not be a quite useful tool to general users, but valuable for academic students. This is the world’s largest hub of academic articles. Right next to search button in Google Scholar Home Page, you can find two links for Preferences and Advanced search. They allow you to fine tune your search result by giving your default preferences and narrow down search result by giving specific searching criteria. In the search result it shows the academic paper or the book section related to search keyword. Further it shows the other articles which already cited the subject article along with related articles which will help you to enrich your forthcoming academic paper.
Sometimes there are articles in databases where you need paid membership to read. In such cases Google will list only the introduction page. To proceed you have to get the membership. If you are an academic student, in most of the cases your university will give you the relevant access to paid article databases.
Google Public Data Explorer
This is again very uncommon type of search engine and hardly ever used by general Google users. If you take a good look in to Google Public Data Explorer, you will be able to find useful information and statistics about your country, or the globe. This is maintaining various different data sets collected by different organization. By accessing a dataset you can see statistical data in graphical format including charts.
Ex: Dataset: World Bank, World Development Indicators -> Gross Domestic Product
Here you can see the total GDP in world and using the side bar you can select a specific county. Further, you can select more than one country to compare the values. Upon your selection, the chart will change real time. You can change the chart type in top left corner.
Google Finance
Google Finance is a specialized search engine which gives you latest market quotes and news from financial world. It collects trading data from many stock indexes and presents it in graphical format. The best part is numbers are changing real time when market opens. So you can get most up to date idea about stock prices along with the latest news.
This is a good place for an investor to do a historical analysis of price patterns and collect valuable information for a strategic investment.
In the search box you can enter a company name or short code in relevant stock index.
Ex: If you want to search for Apple Inc, you can enter “Apple” or “AAPL”
This will take you to the stock prices of Apple Inc along with the chart. Chart provides you a range of options to see historical price patterns and trade volumes. By going to ‘setting’ just under the chart you can change the chart style and intervals. If you are an experienced investor, you will probably change the chart style to “Candlestick” and set the chart interval according to your trading system. By visiting Technicals you can include indicators which helps you to do technical analysis such as Moving Average Convergence and Divergence (MACD) or Bollinger Bands. In here you can include more than one indicator to make this platform an advanced technical analysis tool.
This is a slight insight to uncommon Google products, their fine features and strengths. This makes us realize how far Google has come in information technology market and how it dominates the whole world. Within a short period of time it has changed the global life style and made our lives easier. The important thing here is, no matter how big they are, no matter what kind of monopoly they hold, most of their valuable services come free and they earn money with advertising. Hats off for this smart business model!
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