Google Tools
Tools
Main article: Blogger
In 2003, Google acquired the Pyra Labs and
Blogger services. Formerly premium features that
needed to be paid for were made available for free by Google. The tool,
Blogger, is a service to make weblog publishing
easier. The user does not have to write any code or worry about installing
server software or scripts. Nevertheless, the user can influence the design
of their blog freely.
Code
Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related
development. The site contains Open Source code and lists of their API
services.
Main article: Gmail
On April 1, 2004, Google announced its own free webmail service,
Gmail, which would provide users with 1000 MB
(actually 1 GB, or 1024 MB) of storage for their mailboxes and would
generate revenue by displaying advertisements from the
AdWords service based on words in users email
messages. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release
was greeted with much skepticism in the technology world. Jonathan
Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, re-assured BBC News by
saying "We are very serious about Gmail."
When Gmail was announced, the storage space
available was vastly more than that of most other free webmail providers—for
example, Microsoft's Hotmail only offered 2 MB, and Yahoo!'s Mail service
offered 4 MB. (In response to Gmail, Yahoo's limits
have been upgraded to 250 MB and then again, to 1 GB for their free
accounts, and 2 GB for their premium account; Hotmail's limits are being
upgraded to 250MB.) There has been a great deal of criticism regarding
Gmail's privacy policy. Most of the criticism was
over Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to emails by
automatically scanning them. Google continues to refute some of this
criticism by pointing out that GMail is using
mostly industry wide practices.
On April 1, 2005 Google announced that they would begin constantly
increasing mailbox size by approximately 1 MB every 75 seconds, with no plan
to stop. This actually was an April Fool's joke, but the company did
simultaneously announce that it was increasing mailbox size to 2 GB, with a
promise to add more space in the future. They are continuously adding more
space, much slower than during April 1. On their webpage, they show how much
space they are currently providing. By April 11, Google was adding storage
at approximately 3.5 MB each day.
Although Google's Gmail is still in beta testing,
and not open to the general public, users who do have an account have 5 (new
users) to 100 (older users) "Gmail invites" that
they can send to others. The number of invites a person has regenerates over
time.
Gmail is anticipated to go open to the general
public in early 2006. Although Google has not yet set an official date for
open admittance, any person in the United States with a cell phone capable
of text messaging can now sign up without an invite from a current user at
https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1.
Language Tools
This tool allows users to use Google in many different
languages.
Main article: Google Reader
On October 7th 2005, Google launched Google
Reader, a feed reader, or "news aggregator", capable of reading Atom and
RSS feeds. Google Reader is accessed
through a web browser and features an interface similar to
Gmail. It allows you to subscribe to feeds by URL,
import/export subscription lists using OPML, and search for new feeds. The
service also embeds audio enclosures in the page. To add a "Add to
Google Reader" Button with 1-click
subscriptions to your webpage visit the link below.
Main article: Google
Sitemaps
In June 2005 Google released the Google
Sitemaps tool into beta testing. Google
Sitemaps allows Webmasters to generate a file that lists the URLs on the
site in order for better indexing of the website. Google makes no promises
about increasing PageRank with this tool, but it
allows the Webmaster to get some feedback on the URLs that Google is
searching.
Web API
The Google Web API (or Google Web
Services) is
Google's public interface for registered developers. Using Simple Object
Access Protocol (SOAP), a programmer can write
services for
search and data mining that rely on Google's results. Also, websurfers can
view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.
By default a developer has a limit of 1,000 requests per day. This program
is still in a beta phase. Google is one of the few search engines to make
its results available via a public API; Technorati is another good example.
Some popular implementations of the Google Web API include the alerting
service Google Alerts, or FindForward, as
well as the Google Dance Tool, which monitors when Google is spidering the
Internet.
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