• Create word processing documents on the Web

• Learn to format documents using the Google Docs document editor

• Discover how to save Web-based documents to your hard drive in many different formats

• Build your first Google Docs spreadsheet

• Build entire applications with the power of Google Docs spreadsheet formulas

• Manage your Google Docs files online

Google does not have a product or application called Office. That’s why I’ve placed it in quotes. What it does have is Google Docs, previously known as Writely and Google Spreadsheets, two online office automation products. There is no doubt that these two products fall outside of the general goal of controlling the world’s information, but they are related. After all, they are the two most common types of information-handling tools in the world. So, it still makes sense for Google to have these products.

Unlike other office-automation products common in the marketplace, these two products are Web-based and, of course, are free. One of the distinct advantages these products offer is the ease with which others can collaborate on the creation and editing of documents.

• Posting to Google Base

• Learn the Google Base guidelines

• Manage your posts

• Searching Google Base

• Understand the Google Base results

Want the world to know about your chicken soup recipe? Do you have information you want posted and have no idea where to put it? Google Base is the place. Google has created a place where you can post just about any kind of information. Point your Web browser to http://base.google.com (see Figure 17.1). Google didn’t just create a bulletin board like everyone else’s. When you post things on the Google Base, you add attributes used to describe your post. This makes it easier for others searching in one of several Google search services to find your post.

Of course, like many other Google services, Google Base is free. Search Google Base or post your own items of interest.

• Introducing Google Finance

• Use Google Financial News to stay on top of the market

• Review detailed company information using Google Finance and related services

• Participate in discussions and blogs about companies and stocks

• Manage your financial portfolio with Google’s Portfolio Manager

Google Finance combines information it retrieves from the Web with data that it licenses from financial data sources. The Google Finance home page provides timely financial data in an easy-to-read format. Point your browser to http:// finance.google.com to get started toward your next couple million bucks.

Learn detailed information about company stocks and mutual funds, but Google Finance does not cover bond information or option quotes.

• Learn how Google Scholar ranks search results

• Focus your scholarly search with the Advanced Search

• Understand the Google Scholar search results

• Publishers, have Google Scholar index your publications

• Learn some tips on Internet citation

• Add a Google Scholar Search box on your Web site

“Stand on the shoulders of giants.” This appears in bold green letters in the middle of the Google Scholar page at http://scholar.google.com. All research is in some way based on the work of others. The Internet, and now specifically Google Scholar, has made accessing the publication of these scientific endeavors simple. Simply searching the Web isn’t always the most efficient way to do scholarly research. So, Google built a special system that provides access to content not available on the Web but instead resides in scholarly publications that have allowed their content to be indexed by Google. Google Scholar is a free service that has been shown to provide citation ability equal to other expensive services.

• Find your way through the news

• Read the news in your own language

• Search through Google News

• Personalize the Google News page

• Set up a Google News Feed

• Stay up to date with Google Alerts

• Manage Google Alerts

Google is a news service of a different sort. Technically, Google is a news aggregator. Rather than having its own reporters and gathering its own news, Google searches through the news of 4,500 other news sources and presents the best of the news to you in a form that feels like other news pages.

• Search and view locations in Google Earth

• Mark the places you’ve seen with placemarks

• Use Google Earth navigation tools to take guided tours of the earth

• Add polygons and paths to your satellite images

• Select the right version of Google Earth for your personal or business needs

It is not often in life that access to a completely new kind of information enters our lives, and changes them forever. This is what Google Earth has done for many people around the world. Google Earth provides simple, powerful, and rapid access to the entire Earth via satellite imagery, some of it captured in such high resolution that you can clearly see the shadows of the people on the ground and even make out the make and model of cars parked in front of houses.

The Google Earth images are being used for quite a number of different applications. Now, when you get driving directions you can see more than artistically drawn map, you can actually see landmarks, large trees, you can even see what buildings look like from above. Amazing fly-throughs have been created for large events, like air shows, to show people what the events look like, and where certain displays are located. Annotated Google Earth maps provide location information for businesses, national parks, clubs and World Heritage Sites.

• Learn to use the Google Map Interfaces

• Search for local business

• Let Google Map give you driving directions

• Get more visibility by adding your business

• Learn how you can go farther with Google Maps

Google Maps (maps.google.com) uses Google’s powerful search technology to power many map-based services. Dynamic, interactive maps allow you to scroll to new map areas without waiting for the entire map to refresh. Google Maps simplifies getting directions, finding businesses, and obtaining satellite views of the Earth using either your mouse or keyboard. The map information can even be accessed with many mobile devices. Google Maps utilizes a combination of JavaScript and XML commonly referred to as Ajax, for faster screen loading and user customization.

Much of the data Google Maps uses to calculate these routes comes from a geographic information system provider called Navteq. Its digital map database is used by businesses for a variety of things including fleet management and GPS navigation. Navteq was recently selected as the primary map data provider for the U.S. government.

Because Google Maps uses this satellite data to plot your route, these directions are far more useful than those you might plot using a traditional paper map. One-way streets or Do Not Enter signs are already accounted for, and this information can be updated much faster digitally and more frequently than traditional paper maps. Similarly, information about new roads, road closures, and new construction is already included in your Google Maps directions.

• Desktop features

• Installing the Desktop

• Managing Panels

• Preference for Google Desktop

• Plug-ins

• Google Desktop Enterprise

• Create and Share

• Google Update

Google offers software that you can download to your computer and use to perform searches through your files and folders on your personal computer. Google Desktop is a free software program that not only gives you the power of Google on your own hard drive but also allows you to have fun with its plug-ins and gadgets.

• Learn to sign up for Alerts

• Learn about News Alerts

• Make use of Web Alerts

• How to use Groups Alerts

• Learn about managing Alerts

In this day and age, finding time to read the newspaper, watch the news, or listen to the radio is difficult. Still, it’s important to keep track of the news, information found on the Web, or posted in the Usenet News groups. Even when you have time to read the newspaper or news Web site in the morning, keeping abreast of the news throughout the day can be difficult. Google has developed E-mail Alerts for anyone that needs to stay on top of the latest news or events happening around them. Because most people now read their e-mail throughout the day, getting special news alerts in your e-mail is a great way to stay abreast of changing information.

• Introducing Google Directory

• Searching the Directory

• Navigating the Categories

• Managing your Directory Search Results

• Learn about the Open Directory Project

• Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project

• Google Directory in your own language

Google Directory (http://directory.google.com) is a completely different view of the Web than you might be used to experiencing through Google. In addition to using Google’s powerful search technology, searching can be done manually by the user. To facilitate this type of browsing, Google Directory organizes the World Wide Web by topic into categories.

Google Directory is based on the open source project called DMOZ or, for people who don’t speak acronym, Open Directory Project. The primary difference between experiencing the Web through directories and by simply performing Google searches and surfing through the results is that directories - and in particular this one - are edited by humans. While dependent upon someone else’s opinion of what may or may not be relevant to a topic, it manages to cut out most of the non-relevant information that tends to overwhelm someone searching the Web.

Google Directory is not a clone of the DMOZ directory. Instead, Google applies its PageRank technology to the information submitted by the DMOZ editors. This ensures that results are organized by order of importance. Even in a human-edited directory with more than 1.5 million entries, it’s easy for the result you are looking for end up lost in the weeds. PageRank ensures that the most relevant and most important pages appear first.

Google Directory information also forms an information base for Google’s standard Web search. When additional information exists in the Google Directory for a Web page, Google displays this information as part of its normal Web search.

• Experience a new kind of shopping with Froogle

• Navigating the Froogle Results page

• Find products fast with Smart Search

• Learn comparative shopping

• All about Ratings & Reviews

• Creating My Shopping List

One of the biggest uses of the Internet, after communications, is shopping. More people shop online today than ever before, and it’s not hard to believe that someday shopping online will surpass shopping in brick and mortar stores. Of course, it’s hard to pass up the air conditioning of the local mall on a hot day. Even with the temptation of cool air on a hot day, Google has made the online shopping experience even more fun and more powerful by creating a tool that allows you to comparison shop for products based on price and features. Chapter 7 showed you how easy it is to view catalogs online. Comparison shop with Google’s Froogle and there is no need to ever leave the house again. You can do all your shopping online.

• Learn to search through online Catalogs

• Advanced searching through the catalogs

• Navigating catalogs with Google’s special interface

• Get your catalog online with Google Catalogs

It may not be as fun, or as creatively useful as the old Sears catalog, but Google has created a streamlined and common way you can search the catalogs of many online vendors. This way you don’t have to figure out where and how to navigate through the many kinds of online catalogs. You can do all your searching in a single place.

Google has scanned catalogs from partner vendors. You can see the vendor’s full-color catalog online in an easy-to-browse format. You can navigate to the vendor’s home page and have the catalog right at your fingertips. You can also use some of the other Google shopping tools such as Froogle to comparison shop by switching back and forth between Froogle and Google Catalogs. You may find vendors that you never knew existed have exactly what you’re looking for.

Browsing through catalogs gives you an entirely different experience than many e-commerce sites that try to get you to the page where you click the Buy button. Catalogs make you familiar with a company’s entire line of products. You may find companion products or models that are superior to the product you had in mind. You might just enjoy browsing catalogs without the intention of buying anything. For example, many hobbyists browse catalogs to keep up with the latest gadgets and things of interest.

• Find books using Google Book Search

• Use the Advanced Search features to focus your book search

• Discover detailed information about books that interest you

• Read entire books in the public domain

• Librarians learn to use Google Book Search in your library

• Learn about the Google Books Partner Program

It may seem unusual that one of Google’s key search areas is for books, one of its few non-digital-oriented search technologies. It’s going to be a very long time before we see the end of paper books. Google’s Book search allows you to discover books that you’d like to purchase or obtain. Once you “discover” a book you can buy it online, or use Google’s library catalog system discussed later in this chapter.

It was actually the Google Book project that formed the foundation of Google in the very beginning. While creating software to help index digitized books while working as researchers on the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a crawler named BackRub. It was the work they did on BackRub that formed the foundation of Google’s PageRank system, the core of the Google search technology.

Google Book Search is NOT a bookstore, and Google does not make money if you purchase books through its search pages. This is important to know so that you can be assured that the search results you view are not biased to allow for greater book sales. You may find contextual ads placed on some of the book pages by permission of the publisher. Clicking on these ads is how Google pays its employees.

• Find videos to watch by category and featured lists

• Play selected videos on the Web

• Tell others about videos you see on Google video

• Learn to download and use the Google Video Player

• Purchase videos for viewing

• Upload and share your video with others

• Manage your videos and add transcripts

If you are bored watching cable TV and need entertainment, try Google Video. It’s a fun place to find videos on practically any topic. Google Video hosts free amateur videos, free funny clips, or previews for some of your favorite TV shows and digital movies. After you watch the previews to longer productions, Google makes it easy to purchase them to watch any time you want.

• Finding images using the Google Image Search page

• Creating effective search terms

• Viewing images

• Using the Advanced Search Features

• Eliminating adult content

• Copyrighted images

The World Wide Web has always included images. Even before the creation of Mosaic, the first graphic Web browser, you could download and view images from the Web. Today, images are a normal part of the user experience when surfing the Web. The collection of images on the Internet today is truly innumerable. Google has a direct interface to images found on the Internet that are included in Google’s index of Web pages.

Whether you want an image to display on your desktop, create a greeting card for a friend, add graphics to a school or business report, or any other reason, the best method for finding images is using Google’s Image Search. This chapter helps you quickly learn how to find the image you are looking for using the simple interface or the advanced search features. You also learn how to virtually eliminate sexually explicit images from your search results. Finally, this chapter gives you an idea of what rights you have when using an image you download from the Internet.

• Find U.S. government-related information fast using the special topic search

• Learn to find information about Linux

• Locate information about the BSD operating system

• Learn about the Macintosh topic search

• Discover the Microsoft special topic search

• Add special Google Site Search to your Public Service Web site

• Find out about university Web page searching

• Find historic news articles in Google’s News Archive

Google has created special topic areas to help focus your searches. At the moment, the number of topics is still small, but we expect it to grow over time. When you do a Google search using these special topic areas, your query is limited to just that topic, which highly refines your search.

• Track packages, define words and find specialized information

• Learn to perform Special queries on cached pages or similar pages

• Search Google News, Google Groups, and Froogle

• Focus your search using the Advanced Search

• Narrow your search by finding results in a previous search

Most of the time, the simple Google search helps you find the Web content you need. There will be other occasions, however, where your search is too broad and you need to narrow, or focus, your search. Focusing your search results in fewer matches, hopefully limiting the number of Web pages you need to explore in order to arrive at just the right information. Focusing your search can be accomplished using search operators - special Google commands that tell the search engine how to limit the search - using the Google Advanced Search, and using topic-specific searches. You can also search within your results, further narrowing the results.

• Searching the Web

• How Google searches the Web

• Using Keywords

• The Search Result Page

• Using the I’m Feeling Lucky Button

• Getting the Right Pages

• Setting Search Preferences

Web searching has become a part of the day-to-day life of any person who has a computer. Searches vary from words, phrases, products, people, images, and many other forms. Today, when you want to know something you simply do a Web search. There are many search engines but none, according to searchengineshowdown.com, quite as large due to Google’s inclusion of file types such as PDF, DOC and PS, not indexed by other search engines. What makes Google so powerful is not just the sheer number of files it has indexed, but the tools that make arriving at the answer to your question simple and straightforward.

This chapter helps you learn to better form your queries and introduce you to the basic Google search. Even the basic Google search is powerful and gives you an amazing amount of control over how you view your results and how to best focus your search so that you arrive quickly and easily at the results you seek.