2007: Year of the GOOGLE

As Chinese New Year approaches one world online superpower looks poised to truly make the year its own. As if pre-eminent search engine Google has not made an impact and affected our online lives enough then 2007 promises to be very much Year of the Google rather than Year of the Pig!

Google continues to plough resource into its ‘suite’ of products and services – the introduction of Google Labs and its focus on making both useful and, yes, free products has placed Google at the very cutting edge of today and tomorrow’s internet.

Google Labs continues to develop an ongoing collection of user-centric online applications. Already ‘graduated’ from Labs are products such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a free online alternative to Microsoft’s Word and Excel, Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Groups and Google Desktop. The focus is on offering users online applications with a focus on usability and personalised experiences. Users can create detailed personalised homepages, searches and news alerts - trying to focus the power and scale of the internet to give users exactly what they want, when they want it. All under the Google branded umbrella of course!

Below is a selection of these tools, freely available, that can help you drive your business forward:

• Google Alerts is one of our favourites as once you put in a key term it emails you every time Google finds a new result for it. Put in your competitors name and always stay up to date with what they are doing. Include an industry topic such as 'carbon factors' and you'll always be kept up to date.
• Google Trends allows you to compare multiple topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. This is a great research tool and can quickly establish the internet markets, specific to Google's demographic, perspective on say 'coffee' vs. 'tea'.

Google Reader is a personalised web-based ‘feed’ reader to keep track of your favorite web sites and pull your chosen content into one location. Very much like an email inbox for the web.

• Google Analytics has made some real waves lately and even though its free it has huge benefit. Working closely with Google Adwords, Analytics provides a wealth of information about who, what, where and how people are using your website. It only takes a minute to set up and is a first critical step to truly understanding your website.
• Google Suggest is a real-time suggestion tool that gives you a list of topics that you can choose from. This is great if you are looking for something uncommon and not sure what exactly you are looking for - try it out using 'import duty'.

All of these tools can provide huge benefit to everyday business. The world, and now even Mars (google 'google mars'), is your oyster in 2007 – Year of the Google!

Further reading:
Google Alerts
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Analytics
Google Suggest
Google Labs