The Wonderful World of Google

Searching, Searching Better, and Tracking Results
Most everybody knows that Google is a search engine. But it is actually a set of search engines to find all sorts of information:
general: google.com
blogs: blogsearch.google.com
images: images.google.com
news: news.google.com
places: maps.google.com (also see this for 100 things to do with google maps)
books: books.google.com (complete Shakespeare)
scholarly articles/books: scholar.google.com
stuff to buy: www.google.com/products
videos: video.google.com
patents: www.google.com/patents
US Government sites: http://www.google.com/ig/usgov

You can also create your own search engine through google's custom search engine creator. You select what sites for the engine to look at to return results.

Do you know how Google works? How does the engine decide which results to post first? Well, they use a program that looks at how many links to a page a page has and the keywords on a page. Here's more: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. Google also has it's own page just for educators. It has some recommendations for using Google; it's intended for K-12 teachers. They have free printable posters on using Google.

What a lot of people don't know is that there are ways to use any of these search sites more efficiently. A great set of tips is from www.GoogleGuide.com  which has a cheat sheet that's worth looking at. For example, did you know you can use google as a calculator, phone book, or dictionary? There are even more Google search tips on this lifehacker blog post, like tracking packages and flights and getting more accurate Google image results.

Some folks have tried to make Google even better by getting rid of some of the product results. Try Give me back my Google, for one.

Google Trends will show you what's popular in their searches with top 10 lists and the ability to compare the popularity of search terms. Try this: do a comparison search of some of the current presidential candidates to see if who is winning the polls is also winning google!

When searching, you can use Google notebook to keep track of what you find. It's a very slick little add-on where you "clip" pages into your notebook as you browse. You can add your own notes with the clippings. You can have different notebooks to organize different searches, and you can share your notebooks with collaborators or make it a public web page.

If you are searching from a browser while you are logged into your google account, google will log your search history by date. You can even run trends to see what you've been searching most often. Find this by selecting "my account" on the top navigation from any google page.

When you're using Google Books, you can create a library. (Likewise, if you use Google Finance, you can create a portfolio.)

Web-Based Applications
Beyond searching and tracking searches, Google has a full suite of web-based programs for doing all sorts of things. These programs are all free. There's nothing to download and most are quite easy to learn.

Google calendar: There are lots of online calendar applications out there. Google calendar does what most of them do: keeps track of your appointments, enables sharing of calendars among friends or colleagues or allows for public calendars. You could put your course schedule into a Google calendar, publish it, and link it to (or embed it) your course website. Students would be able to download that calendar into their personal calendar. It's worth exploring.

Gmail: Email by Google. Gmail has incredible spam filters (I forget that spam exists, really). It  gives you the capacity to send and receive large files. Gmail says you won't ever have to delete messages, because they are constantly increasing the size of users' accounts. Right now, it's at over 6000 MB. (Ball State will give you about 20 MB.) Users can "archive" older messages instead of deleting. It's web-based, so you can access it from any computer. You can create folders and filters, and it has a really efficient way of making messages into "conversations." So, say you have a message exchange with four people about finding a meeting time. All of those messages are linked together in your email box. Of course, since this is Google, you can search your mail very easily.

Groups: As you can see from the group page Casey made for this class, Google Groups have a lot of potential. You can post documents, images, and create pages very fast. Groups come with a group email address. (Ours is eng604@googlegroups.com). When creating a group, you can control who can join, view, edit, and post to your group pages. Besides creating a group for your class or having students make group pages, students could join already established groups.
Google Pages:

Google Docs: These are some of Google's newest tools--an entire office suite online. The word processor started a few years back as Writerly. It enables you to compose documents online, save, edit, print, format, share, collaborate, revert to earlier versions, and publish your files. You can start with a document from another program or you can start from scratch. I don't like the interface as much as I like MS Word, but it's capabilities and convenience are outstanding. Oh--get this, you can also save all your documents as pdfs in one step. Google Docs also includes a spreadsheet program and presentation program (more on that one later). I've used Google Docs for writing collaboratively, for my own writing because I work on two different computers, and for posting information on the web for students.

Google gadgets: These are little things (widgets) you can add to your blog or website. They are not created by Google, but by Google users. Most of these would only be useful for entertainment, but some might help your own work as a teacher or help your students.

Blogs (Blogger): Details on Blogger are here from last class. Google bought Blogger a few years back. I think everyone is happy with that.

Reader: I mentioned this feed reader here. It's a good program to use if you are on different computers throughout the day and/or already pretty familiar with Google's interface.

iGoogle: This application allows you to customize your Google search page. You can add the content you want to your Google page: news, RSS feeds, weather, fun facts, videos, etc. You should consider using this feature if you often go to, say, CNN to get the latest national news, then to the Weather Channel for your weather, and then to YouTube for the top videos of the day. You could see them all from the same webpage. Yahoo offers this sort of customization, too. It could be one way to control your interface, as Stuart Selber describes in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age.
This is similar to Google Desktop, which is a download for your computer desktop to help you search your own files and add Google gadgets.

Other Stuff We'll Talk about Later
Social Networking (Orkut) demographics
Image Sharing (Picasa)
Google Videos & YouTube
Google Talk
SketchUp
Google Page Creator (for making web pages)
Google Analytics (for seeing who is visiting your site)

Other Stuff We Won't Talk about Later, But Might Interest You
Google Earth
Google Language Translation Tools
Google Pack for PCs, for Macs
Google Advertising
Google for Businesses