Google Announces New Products

[DudeAsInCool]

Say hello to Google Gadgets

Today we released the latest version of Google Desktop in 7 languages (the rest are coming soon). The biggest news is that we're introducing Google Gadgets - 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. We've also made it really easy for developers to create their own gadgets - almost as easily as you’d create a web page. One of my favorites is the weather globe.

Google Gadgets/Google Desktop

Google Trends

Google Trends, allowing you to search Google traffic (instead of using the word “Beta" for Google Trends, Google shows a special Labs logo). Note there has to be a threshold of minimum searches for a trend graph to show up. The internal name of this product seems to have been iZeitgeist, as Tony Ruscoe found out.

Google Trends

Google Co-Op

Google Co-op is about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating "subscribed links" for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.

This is a work in progress, but even in its early stages, Google Co-op has the potential to let you contribute your expertise to the overall goal of making information more discoverable for everyone.

Improve search in the topics you know best

Google search covers a wide array of topics. You can contribute to the ones you know best by labeling webpages in those areas. Learn more about topics.

Here are some topics that are currently being developed:

Destination Guides

Health

Autos

Computer & Video games

Photo & Video equipment

Stereo & Home theater

Google Co-Op

And finally, Google Notebook, which will available next week:

The fourth announcement is Google Notebook, which Marissa says will be available from the Google Labs next week (the URL google.com/notebook currently redirects to google.com/gn, which returns a file-not-found message). Notebook is a little notes window that follows you from the Google search results to other sites, allowing you to collect bits and pieces of information. You can also make public parts of Google Notebook to share it with others.