Understanding Google Tools
According to the website How Stuff Works, "The backbone to Google's business is its search engine, but that's not the only service Google offers. Do a little digging on Google's site and you'll come across everything from productivity applications to an instant messaging client. Google developed some of these products and features itself. But in some cases, Google products started out as independent projects designed by other companies. If Google executives see an interesting application that helps the company achieve its goals, there's a chance Google will make an offer to acquire that company" (2008).*
Exploring Google Tools
This link will take you to a full listing of Google Tools or Products.
Google Tools Helpful to Students
Below are some of the Google Tools you, as a student, may find useful, and a brief description of what they do:
Search for blogs on all of your favorite topics.
Search the latest index of the world's books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free. Also offers the option to purchase books on Google Play.
Explore the whole earth without ever having to pack a bag.
A web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies. The news is presented in a spreadsheet-like format by day. It provides the time the story was published, the source, a photo, available videos, and a brief summary of the story.
View and share photos from around the world.
Narrow down search results for complex searches by using the Advanced Search page. For example, find websites written in Spanish that have "Paella" in the title and were updated in the last 24 hours. Or find black and white images of New York.
How the Advanced Search page works (because it looks a little different):
- Go to the Advanced Search page.
- Enter your search terms in the “Find pages with” section.
- Choose the filters you want to use in the “Then narrow your results by” section. You can use one or more filters.
- Click Advanced Search.
How the Advance Image Search page works (it also looks slightly different)
- Enter a search term in Google Images search.
- Click the Gear icon, then select Advanced search.
- Scroll down and use the usage rights drop down menu to select free to use or share, even commercially. ...
- Click the Advanced Search button.
- Just to be safe, you want to double check that the image is really "free" to use.
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs—that match the user's search term. You could set an alert for your name, for instance.
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003.
Provides directions, interactive maps, and satellite/aerial imagery of many countries. Can also search by keyword such as type of business.
Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Instantly translate text, web pages, and files between over 50 languages.
Search millions of videos from across the web.
Conversations that come to life--hang out with your friends anytime, anywhere, for free. But not during class, of course.
References
*Strickland, Jonathan. "10 Useful Google Tools," HowStuffWorks.com. Web. 5 Aug 2008. 12 March 2015.