{"id":2561,"date":"2011-09-30T11:39:30","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T15:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/?p=2561"},"modified":"2021-10-19T06:48:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T10:48:20","slug":"having-fun-with-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/having-fun-with-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Having Fun with Google!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know Google as a search engine.\u00a0 You also know that, like all search engines, they constantly add different features to bring in more users.\u00a0 So you’ve probably heard of, say, Google Maps<\/a>, Google Earth<\/a> and now Google+<\/a>.\u00a0 But did you know about these other services?<\/p>\n

Picnik<\/strong><\/p>\n

Picnik<\/a> is Google’s free Photoshop equivalent.\u00a0 Instead of just relying on reviews we tested it out.\u00a0 It loaded pretty quickly, was easy to use, and provided an impressive array of options for a free service.\u00a0 One nice feature is the ability of users to upload their own filters, a lot of which we enjoyed.\u00a0 We’re not sure what the pay service offers outside of layering: if you don’t need that, then you’ll probably find enough functionality in the free one.<\/p>\n

Google Books<\/strong><\/p>\n

Google has the goal of scanning every book every published and displaying the full text on their web site.\u00a0 No one will fault them for aiming too low, given that they themselves estimate this number to be roughly 130 million.\u00a0 What’s more is that this has run into all sorts of copyright issues.\u00a0 Nonetheless, there are currently 2 million books available through Google Books<\/a>, and this number continues to increase.<\/p>\n

Panoramio<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sort of fusing Google Earth, Google Street View and Wikipedia, Panoramio<\/a> lets users upload pictures of real-world locations, and submit them so that they are viewable and linked to Google’s other services.\u00a0 Note that pictures are reviewed by internal editors, so it doesn’t have Wikipedia’s immediacy.\u00a0 On the other hand this means that you don’t have to worry about your kids finding adult material uploaded by some wiseguy.\u00a0 Also users who send in photos can choose their own licensing restriction.<\/p>\n

Google Trends<\/strong><\/p>\n

OK, perhaps it’s only a geek like me that finds this fascinating.\u00a0 Still, maybe others will enjoy a section of Google that will display a graph showing the historical search popularity of certain terms.\u00a0 I say this even staring at the sadness of how much the word \u201cpinball\u201d has declined as a search term since 2004.\u00a0 Anyway, you can modify your graph to search by specific region or time period, and the data can be exported as a CSV file.<\/p>\n

Google Scholar<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Chances are either you know of this and already use this, or else don’t and don’t have much need of it.\u00a0 Nevertheless, if the democratic nature of the internet can get much for you some days and you want peer-reviewed papers on a serious topic, here is where you’d find it.\u00a0 While much of what you’ll find here you could find just through Google proper, it’s the options here that make this feature useful.\u00a0 Not only can you search by subject area, publication name and publishing date, but you can even search through legal opinions, including those of specific courts.<\/p>\n

Google Translate<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

We could be serious here and close out this list with Google Code and all of the API tools that it includes, or Google SketchUp<\/a>, their downloadable 3D renderer.\u00a0 That’s all useful, but we feel instead like pointing out that Google Translate is now 50 languages large, including the ability to auto-detect the input language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know Google as a search engine.\u00a0 You also know that, like all search engines, they constantly add different features to bring in more users.\u00a0 So you’ve probably heard of,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2733],"tags":[130],"class_list":["post-2561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tools","tag-google"],"views":72,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}