Google has unveiled four new products to demonstrate that it
sees innovation as key to maintaining its dominance of the internet
search market.
The products were demonstrated at Google's
Searchology showcase event at the company's Mountain View
headquarters.
Google has over 63% of the US search market, compared with rival
Yahoo's 20% share. It released 365 products in 2008 and 120 in the
first three months of this year.
Google Squared, a product due for release next month, takes
information from several web pages and displays it in a spreadsheet
format.
Instead the traditional list of links to other websites, Google
Squared displays a page of information related to the search term
that has been taken from a variety of sources.
Google Search Options is a tool designed to help internet users
refine searches by choosing options such as product reviews, forum
posts, videos, blogs, images or timelines.
The
Rich Snippets feature is aimed at helping users find the right
web pages by showing them a small sample or snippet of content in
the search results.
Google is enabling Rich Snippets by using a web standard called
RDFa which allows
web developers to put in extra tagging to generate the rich
snippets.
Web developers can also use RDFa to include more detailed
descriptions of the website for search engines that is invisible to
users.
The fourth innovation on show was an application for mobile
phones using the Android operating system called
Skymap.
The application uses an Android phone's orientation sensors and
GPS functionality to display a star map of the user's location.
Last month,
Sam Schillace, director of engineering at Google, told Computer
Weekly that Google also plans to develop tools to help users to
manage and sift through personal data.
He envisages expanding Google's GMail into a service that will
allow users to manage all their internet communications, including
alerts and chat sessions.