Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

Search

google-watn.gif

sai-25-prev.gifsai-25-next.gif

GoogleOriginalSearch.jpg

Products

Advertisement

Accessible Search: Search for the blind and visually impaired. Launched in July 2006, niche.

Base: A database of many things, ranging from reviews to products for sale. Launched in 2008. Another tool that helps Google index the entire Internet. Not killing Craigslist any time soon.

Blog Search: Search engine for blogs. Launched Sept. 2005. Google Blog Search's main competitor is Technorati, which has 112.8 million blogs indexed. Google doesn't disclose how many blogs it indexes. But given that it has the advantage of Google's massive crawler, it is probably the most useful blog search engine in the world.

Book Search: Digitizing books and making them searchable. Launched Oct. 2004. Scanned 1 million books as of March 2007. Formerly called Google Print. Google is still in the middle of lawsuits with the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers (both filed in 2007). The groups say that Google is committing "massive copyright infringement" by digitizing the books, Google says it's protected by fair use. A competitor to Book Search, Microsoft's Live Search Books shut down in May 2008, less than two years after it started.

Advertisement

Catalogs: Search through mail-order catalogs that have been digitized. While there are some current catalogs, many of them are months or years out of date, so it looks like a product that has been neglected by Google.

Custom Search Engine: Create a customized search engine. Launched in May 2006. Yahoo and Microsoft both run similar services, but Yahoo recently took it a step further with BOSS, which allows developers to manipulate the search results however they want to. Google's Custom Search basically allows site owners to embed a Google search bar that conducts a site-specific search, but Google controls how the search operates.

Desktop: Index and search your desktop. Started October 2004, active, but niche.

Experimental Search: Different ways of displaying search results. Launched January, 2008. Yet another Labs product that hasn't been implemented on the main site.

Advertisement

Image Labeler: A game to label images to improve the quality of Google Image Search. Launched August 2006, niche.

Image Search: Search photos and illustrations online. Launched December 2001, active. After acquring DoubleClick, Google is finally experimenting with display ads in Image Search results -- which could make this a money maker at some point.

Movies: Search movie times, reviews. Not nearly as useful as Yahoo! Movies, Amazon's IMDB, or other sites.

News: Search news articles, read AP stories, and access WSJ.com stories for free. Launched April 2002 and fairly popular. Unlike Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, Google doesn't produce any original content, although it recently struck deals to host content from the AP, AFP, and a few other wire services. In June, Google News was ranked 8th in traffic, according to Nielsen. Rival Yahoo News was #1.

Advertisement

Product Search: Search for products online, compare prices, etc. Originally launched as Froogle in December 2002. Google changed its name in April 2007. Froogle was a big deal when it launched, but it hasn't really gone anywhere.

SearchMash: SearchMash came out in 2007 to test "innovative user interfaces." It's still active, and it's pretty neat. You can see image search, blog search, and other results right on the search results page, and in the Flash version of the site, you can see previews of the site you're going to click on.

Sets: Type in a few grouped items, and it will give you other items in that set. Launched 2007. Another Google Labs product that hasn't taken off.

Suggest: Start typing in a search query and it gives you suggestions. Launched in 2004 and recently added to Google's main site.

Advertisement

Visigami: Screensaver that searches for images from Google, Picasa and Flickr. Launched April 2008, niche.

Web Search: The original, flagship product. Launched 1999, active. Google's search has a 71% U.S. market share, according to Hitwise.

Webmaster Tools: Previously Google Sitemaps. Helps Google understand the structure of your Web site so it can better index it for search engine. Launched June 2005, a no-brainer for Webmasters.

Acquisitions

Advertisement

Phatbits: Widget Engine, bought Dec. 1005, became Google Desktop.

Orion: Australian search engine, bought April 2006, became Google Search.

Akwan Information Technologies: Search engine (Brazil).

Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account