Google® Power Tools Bible

Chapter 40. Graduating from the Product Labs

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• Exploring the Red Planet

• Getting around this planet with Google

• Improving your Web experience with Google tools

• Boosting your search capabilities

• Tracking data trends

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Google tools and products don’t spring forth fully-developed and ready to use. Instead, they are incubated and carefully nurtured in a development laboratory. In this final chapter, you can see some of the products currently sporting Google Labs status. Some are ready for moving into the full application world, while others are in differing states of development.

One of the neatest products for space buffs is Google Mars. Similar to Google Earth, the Google Mars product shows you in-depth maps and details of the red planet.

Google is working on some mobile Web technologies such as Google Transit for finding maps, and Google Ride Finder for finding buses and subway schedules and stops.

To enhance your browsing experience, look for Notebook and Google Web Accelerator, two tools designed to make your use of Web content easier to manage.

As you might expect, several different search features are in the works, both for browsing and for providing service to people browsing your site.

On the WEB

Check out the projects and programs in development at http://labs.google.com/.

Applying Map Information

One segment of the work being done in Google Labs is the extension of mapping products. As explained in Chapter 13, Google Earth is a feature-rich ...