Exploring Google

20 January 2009

Everyone knows that Google is a search engine… But did you know what other great tools Google offers?

Over the last week I signed up to 15 of Google’s free tools, and thought I’d share the experience with you…

The first thing I signed up to with Google was about 6 months ago and this was Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a fantastic piece of website analytic software. It will report back to you how many visitors your website has had, how they found your website, what pages they visited on the website, how long they spent on the website and what page they were on when they left the website.
analytics.blogspot.com/2008/12/analytics-adwords-and-big-spenders.html

About 3 months ago I heard of Google Webmaster Tools, and so I also signed up to this. Again, a fantastic piece of software! Find out if your website has any broken links, how many pages of your website are in Google’s index, submit sitemaps to ensure Google crawls every page, find out how many Google users have subscribed to your RSS feeds, find out where all your external links are coming from and get feedback on any potential problems with meta data for the web pages.
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/12/one-place-for-changing-your-sites.html

I’m not finished yet… It was only last week I decided to explore more…

Firstly Google Reader I am finding extremely useful on a day-to-day basis to keep all my RSS feed subscriptions in one place. Also it creates a shared profile page for me so that I can share my favourite feed posts with the rest of the web.
www.google.com/reader/shared/15586057576910103121

Next I tried Google Alerts. Now this although very powerful and I’m sure useful to those who are in the news a lot as, again, you will get a lot of back link feedback – however we’re not in the news all the time, and so this I found a little bit useless for me at the moment.

You Tube is my next addition to the list. “But You Tube isn’t Google”, I hear you cry! Well now Google Videos is a part of You Tube and you can login to You Tube using your Google account.
uk.youtube.com/user/PJNComputerSolutions

Has anyone heard of Google’s social networking website yet? I hadn’t! But when I saw it as a Google product I thought I’d have a look and see what it was all about. If I’m honest it’s nothing new and holds no real value, why not just merge with Facebook as they’ve already got an amazing platform that will be hard to beat!
www.orkut.com/Main#Profile.aspx?rl=ls&uid=3041211831188911051

Make a website for free with Google Sites. “Why point customers in another direction?” I hear you all scream at me! Well to be honest I found the Google Sites a bit “simple” looking and not versatile enough, and so if everyone did go here there would be a million websites all looking the same, just with different content – and, let’s be honest, that’s just boring!
sites.google.com/site/websitedevelopmentswindon/

Picasa is Google’s picture upload product – and again I found this a bit pointless, as if you have a Facebook profile you could do everything you wanted there! Only difference being that you can change the size of the thumbnails and can also order prints on Picasa, and I’m sure Facebook will implement something like this soon anyway!
picasaweb.google.com/PJNComputerSolutions

Lastly, my latest addition from Google’s products is Blogger. I found this very easy to use, and I quite liked the simplicity of the colours and fonts and the functionality to add Google gadgets to your blog pages – however it doesn’t have the functionality as some other blogs – for instance pinging the blog to lots of other blog sites to try and get your blog noticed.
pjncomputersolutions.blogspot.com/

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