The Dilemma of Defining Google - Featuring Google
(Page 2 of 4 )
Featuring Google
I won’t bore you to death echoing the widely popular history of Google. But should you need to refresh your memory then head over to the following websites: here and here.
In this section we will cover a few features of Google. It’s important to be familiar with them because they are very useful and can improve the quality of our time spent online. Additionally, they deserve recognition because of the energy (money, human work and creativity) that goes into their development.
Google started incorporating particular acquisitions from third parties. A prime example of this is their integrating the huge volume of Usenet archives into Google Groups. A more recent example is “shelling out” $1.65 billion for YouTube, an online service that needs no introduction. Other important ones are: Blogger, Urchin (turned into Google Analytics), Writely (turned into Docs and Spreadsheets), Earth, Picasa, Keyhole Corp., etc.
Keep in mind that Google is extremely feature-laden and we cannot cover all of the 75+ online services, desktop applications, and web platforms. Therefore, we’ve picked a few select ones because in our opinion, those can be the most useful to you! Each of them is an independent and unique beauty. And they rock!
Now that your awareness is raised and you’re pretty interested, let’s name those few that we'll discuss in detail: Google Analytics, Google Apps, Google Book Search, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Earth and Google Maps, and Google News and News Archive. Of course, we can’t leave out Blogger, Picasa and GMail.
Google Analytics
In March 2005 Google acquired Urchin — a company that was providing online monitoring and web statistics. They have renamed it Google Analytics and right now it is a freely available service to anybody that has a Google account (which is also free).
This service is designed for webmasters. It brings a significant amount of features to the table: fast implementation, keyword and campaign comparison, custom dashboards, AdWords integration, trend and date slider, ecommerce tracking, funnel visualization, site overlay, email reports, and GeoTargeting, just to name a few.
Google Analytics is a simple but effective free solution to monitoring your website! Implementing it into your website requires adding a JavaScript snippet and you’re done. Answering questions like “Where do my visitors come from?”, “Which search terms did the visitors use?”, “Which pages did the visitors find?”, “How often do my visitors return?”, and so forth was never so easy as with Analytics.
The only drawback that we could think of is the lack of real-time actualization. The statistics are updated once every 24 hours. However, for most of us that’s acceptable.
(Google Analytics Dashboard for a monitored website.)
All in all, Google offers quality and sophisticated solutions for webmasters so that they can “spend on marketing, not on web analytics.” Analytics is easy to use, which is a pro for novices, without sacrificing high-end in-depth features, which are required by experienced professionals to improve their website.
Next: Google Docs/Apps >>
More Website Promotion Articles
More By Barzan 'Tony' Antal
/ 6 
