Google Gears, Part 1

I didn't quite get Google Gears at first. Do I REALLY need to read my blog feeds offline? As it turns out, Google Docs is getting offline support now.

Do I care? Sort of.

When you consider some other Google properties - Blogger, YouTube, News, Book Search, Picasa - you can see how Gears starts to fit into the Google experience. Working on a blog posting? Do it on the train during your commute, it's stored in the Gears database and automatically posts to Blogger when you get an active net connection. Just capture something newsworthy, Mr. Citizen Photojournalist? Dump it from your camera to your laptop running YouTube offline and the video will be stored in the Gears database until it can sync your content with your YouTube account online. Picasa already has a thick client but there's no reason Picasa web albums could not be connected to Gears for offline work.

Interestingly, these ideas aren't what I care about. It's certainly interesting from a usability point of view and allows for greater permeance of Google in your life (if you think that's a good thing) as well as allowing one to publish their virtual lives out to the Googlesphere from anywhere, connected or not.

What I'm truly in is the security controls that are utilized to protect the Gears database and the general security architecture of Gears and all of the Google properties and tools that are becoming offline-enabled. More to follow after I do some research into this.

Google Sites

Google Sites looks to be a SharePoint alternative of sorts.

I'm still trying to figure out where Gears fits into it all.

Google Central (part 1)

Update: Grand Central has become Google Voice

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I feel that I'm turning into some sort of Google-watcher these days or have been a Google junkie without realizing it.

A couple of days ago I found an entertaining video on YouTube (how apropos) of interesting sites and places to visit in Google Earth. I recently posted about new Google search functionality and presentation options. Before that it was a brief look at Google's Android mobile phone platform. Last year I was - and will soon be again - looking at Google Trends as a potential prediction tool for the American Idol contest winner.

This is sort of interesting as it brings a set of old school (Groups - Usenet, Scholar - refereed journals, and Glossary - reference sources) content together with new school (YouTube, Blogger, Google News commentary) together in a jumble of seemingly disparate audiences through Google-branded channels. It clearly extends new school functionality (Web 2.0) into old school mediums (proto-web and Web 1.0) while trying to preserve or normalize the presentation, experience and general consumption of content and services. Through this normalization process, Google is able to preserve/build brand recognition (Google TM) Grand Central, "a production of Google." Their info page asks and answers: "What is GrandCentral? Get all the same calls, but in a whole new way." That's all fine and dandy; it's nothing you can't get from existing, consumer VoIP providers. Their feature set is pretty comprehensive which conceptually place it as a virtual voice communication firewall in some regards.

That's kind of cool but it doesn't seem like a Googlesque sort of venture. Until you add other Google services. Now you have an interesting stack supplying different, but converging on, fully integrated services:

• Unified messaging and search through Gmail, Gtalk, Google SMS, GOOG-411, Grand Central and Android-powered phones - interactive communication anytime, anywhere.
• Location-specific and/or context-relative search through traditional Google search, Google Local/Maps, geo-tagged Picasa pictures, Google's Ride Finder and Transit - find anything and find a way to get to it.
• Topical information via Google Trends, Google Finance, Google SMS and storage through Google Notes and Google Docs/Spreadsheets - search for time-sensitive information through a comparative search funnel, world markets and your own content and have results presented in next-to-real-time via SMS or your personalized iGoogle hompage or Google Desktop.
  
• Organization and sharing/presentation through Google Personalized Search, Google Docs/Calendar, Google Notes, Google Bookmarks, various Alerts (news, SMS, calendar alerts, Blogger post alerts, etc.)
  

This is only a partial analysis (and none too in-depth, by any means) and doesn't take into account relevant issues, such as Google's wireless 700 MHz spectrum bid, which help with the convergence understanding and visualization. I'll post again as it's sort of fun to be an armchair Google strategist.

New Google Search Features

Google has introduced some new search features as experimental through Google Labs. They've added

• right- and left-handed search navigation
• keyboard shortcuts for search results
• keyword suggestions
• alternate views for search results



I like the left-handed search navigation and was playing with the layout and widgets a bit myself last summer when playing with Google's Web Toolkit. eBay has been doing some very similar UI work in its eBay Playground site that I've enjoyed. Amazon tends to overwhelm me at times with JSON this and AJAX that and they can't seem to resist the urge to package the search results and product descriptions to the extreme. I guess this shouldn't surprise me so much as they are a self-billed department store. Netflix, on the other hand, strikes the right balance with me through their consistent and concise detail drill-down through the AJAX essentials, XMLHttpRequest object and javascript onmouseover() event.

I don't particularly care about keyboard shortcuts and search results. This is a personal inconsistency however as I don't use keyboard shortcuts in Gmail either but almost always use the keyboard to navigate between applications, tabs and the OS in general. Maybe this is my unverbalized position that I just don't like the way Google implemented keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'm just inconsistent after all.

The keyword suggestions have been available as a Google Labs offering called Google Suggest for a while and the search bar in Firefox provides JSON-enabled search term suggestions.

The alternative search results are a great move forward with regard to search result presentation, specifically addressing the need for better contextual-based and grouped/ordered search results. I've written about this previously and was eager for new search primitives to address this perceived shortcoming or at minimum search options that accomplished the same thing.

At least I'm not alone in liking the latest search presentation options. Ars Technica described it simply as "awesome".

Google's Android Platform

I'm excited about the Android mobile phone platform and SDK coming out of Google. Here's the "official" overview:

Google Trends - Part 1

Huh...loads of news regarding Google Trends' new functionality: regularly updated info listing the most popular search trends/terms. In one manner, this is obvious - Google has the search data available to them at any given point in time through, presumably, numerous search entry points or via a search funnel. It also makes perfect sense that this functionality, the ability to see what your peers or organization or group is searching for, would be pushed down to the Google Search Appliance at some point.

That's really the interesting addition in my opinion: by localizing search trends, through the GSA or adding a new search primitive, such as fromDomain:, fromIpAddress: or fromNetBlock: (in the same way that the site: or url: search primitives are available now), search/trend consumers would have the ability, from a social networking perspective, to learn what is being searched for, relative to themselves in their own localized search bubble.

Let's consider an example:

Say you're a faculty member at a university and you're vaguely aware of a new collective bargaining vote that's upcoming and you want to know more. You search Google and find press releases and maybe a few local area newspaper items that have been indexed. This is the way in which we normally search or engage in absolute searches, modulo intentional deletions or censoring of search results, etc. Say you're a Google Master and break-out your Google-fu and attempt a more granular search through the selective use of one or two Google search primitives, for example, site:GoogleU.edu. Great! You weren't interested in what was being reported through channels on the other side of the country anyway.

Is this enough? Are the results sufficient in order for a search consumer to best utilize the data provided? Maybe, but it could more than likely be better by taking into account the context of the search results.

Now, say that advanced, localized trending were available to the faculty member. S/he would be able to search, relative to the university community or a specific department or a specific demographic, and determine what his/her peers are searching for, in the hope of learning about key issues being addressed at the collective bargaining vote. Add in the capabilities for search trends and results to be presented in such a way that they can be ordered or grouped and the faculty member may find him/herself better in the know and ready to cast an educated vote.

So...search, trends and localization step up as the latest social networking platform.

I wonder what I spend most of my time searching for and if anyone else cares?