At its annual press day, Google introduced four new products. Most of them showed off one element or another that could be thought of as "social search." Has the search engine giant finally embraced Web 2.0? We take a look.
You have to love a company that can stand to be honest on its annual press day. If Sergy Brin’s comment at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last week didn’t generate knowing guffaws, it really should have. “We probably abuse the word beta.” Sadly, I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you whether he said it with a straight face. But I’m pleased to report that the search engine giant released a number of new products and services that take it back to its core strength of search. And at least one of them even shows that Google is starting to “get it” when it comes to social search and the massive amounts of buzz surrounding Web 2.0.
Google representatives showed off four beta products to an eager press corps: Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, Google Trends, and Google Notebook. The last of the four was so new that a working version was not available on the company’s website at the time of the conference. At the time of this writing, the link to Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) delivered a generic 404 Not Found page, but it might be live by the time this article is published.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to take running notes while you’re surfing the web or involved with a number of different tasks, Google Notebook might have what it takes to make your life easier. This is especially true if you see something and think “Oh Aunt Marge would love to know about this” or “Jim was looking for something just like that” or “That’s just what I need for that project I was going to work on next week” or…you get the picture.
Google Notebook is a tool you use with your browser. It lets you clip text, images, and links from pages you’re browsing, then save them to an online “notebook” that you can access from any computer. You can also share the notebook with others. Matt Cutts reported on the demo in his blog, and noted that the public vs. private sections of the notebook were different colors, which should make it easy for users to tell them apart.
One nice part about Google Notebook is that you don’t have to leave your browser to use it. Another nice part is that it can save images and similar information. I’ve used Notepad as a scratchpad for stuff I’ve found online, but of course Notepad won’t save images. And you can’t just make Notepad public; you’d have to email it to whoever you wanted to share it with. Google’s demonstration of Google Notebook showed how someone might shop for shoes online, save an image and information about a particular pair, write a note about the shoes, and send it to their friends. That’s utterly cool; I can imagine an engaged couple setting up their own private “bridal registry” that way, for example.
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