What’s Next From Google?

“Dear Google, you are the granddaddy of all search engines… Can you please make sure my http://mysite.com is found on page 1 as my Christmas gift this year? I promise I will promote and use all your latest bells and whistles added to the already oh, so useful tools. I promise to gasp every time you come out with a tool I don’t use or have no reason to ever use. Last but not least, I promise I won’t ever tell people you are a bully.”

No matter which way you look at Google, it’s a popular search engine. Whether it’s the best is a topic for debate, since there are new ones (we all know who they are) claiming to be the best. However, there’s no doubt that Google tops the list where users are concerned – perhaps because of its online keyword tools, Adsense program and AdWords campaigns. People prefer to stick with the engine that offers all these services under one roof.

Take a look at the latest from Google. Regardless of whether you use them or not, Google has been busy and we should pay attention.

Google Swirl

Google Swirl is an image search interface. This is similar to the image search launched by Google in 2001, but with a difference. If you search for an image of Washington, DC, you get thousands of images tagged with the word “Washington”. However, with Google Swirl, you can type in “Washington” and not only will you get a map of Washington, a picture of President Washington and the White House, but also the Washington Monument.

The difference here is that each image is a category. If you click on the Picture of President Washington, you will be presented with images of important people in Washington. The Monument Image is a link to images of all monuments in Washington and so on. So Google swirl is an improvement on Google Images… Giving you more for your search.

Google Wave

Google Wave is a new tool that allows live conversation, over the air, with a number of participants. This is a great way to conduct a conversation, share documents and show pictures. Participants can enter the conversation and comment anywhere; they can even rewind and playback the Wave for later review.

Google Wave can be used in a number of ways. For instance, you can brainstorm between people even if they are on different continents, join group projects, keep meeting notes, and even play interactive games. The key here, however, is to find like-minded people to start your Wave with. Something I have yet had time to do but useful, nonetheless. Bravo Google.

Google Trends

Now, I love this tool. Google Trends is an online tool that posts the latest trend in a particular online niche. One can even use this tool to find out the new emerging trends and optimize accordingly. With Google Trends, one can find out how many times a search term is used in a calendar year or from different demographic regions.

Google Trends is really a tool that can give you an in-depth analysis of the type of traffic your keyword has been creating over the last three years. You can even scale down your search to a year or month using Google Trends. Although the number of searches for the given keyword is not mentioned, you can get a lot of information from the report created. This is just a trailer of what you can do with Google Trends.

IGoogle Gadget

The iGoogle gadget is for the iPhone. This gadget allows users of Google Hot Trends to have a peek into the latest searches and sites experiencing a very large surge of traffic within the last couple of hours. Why would you need something like this? This tool can allow people to cash in on traffic generated from certain keywords. Given that this is the holiday season, ‘how to roast a turkey is’ is one of the top searched keywords on Google. Similarly, you can see a hundred top searched keywords – again, in the past few hours. Now that is what I call an interactive real time tool.

Google Ad Planner

This tool was launched in the latter half of 2008 and is a tool for online marketers. Irrespective of what they’re marketing, web masters can use this tool to pinpoint certain market segments and reach out to a highly targeted market. The Google Ad Planner is a research tool to connect advertisers and publishers of niche markets.

This tool requires the user to enter sites related to the product or service they’re promoting, and then enter the demographics of the audience they want to target. The tool creates a list of web sites that people are likely to visit. Using this information, a web master can then further research the statistics – like what keywords those sites are using and where their traffic is coming from (such as search engines, forums or whatever) – then channel some of the traffic to his or her own site.

So, what can we expect Google to come up with next? Given that Google goes with the traffic search words generate and then tries to develop a product to cater to that niche, we believe that Google will come up with a product for the automotive segment or music segment or both. What do you think Google will do next? Will it be useful or will you have it because Google stuffed it in the search engine stocking?