://allthings-bare: Amazing List Of Every Google Product And How Much We Depend On Them

Amazing List Of Every Google Product And How Much We Depend On Them

October 12th, 2010 by Niall Harbison in Google

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Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and they have built their business on the back of their search results coupled with their advertising platform. The Google story is far bigger than just that core product though and today I wanted to have a look at just how many products they have launched, how many we all use today and what products could be a big success for them in the future. The one thing that does shine through though is that despite it’s size Google continues to innovate on a daily basis and produce some remarkably useful products that so many of us use on a daily basis. The big question is where will the next big cash cow come from, will it be the Android operating system or Google TV? What would happen if somebody like Facebook did start to challenge Google in the search wars? Would Google have the ammo to fight back and does Google now have enough products to survive if anything did happen to it’s core business? Anyway I think you will all be shocked at just how many products Google operates and how many of them you actually use…

Current Google Products

The following is a list of some of the main products that Google operate and that we all use on a daily basis. The vast variety of products is staggering and it shows you just how much of a footprint that they have on the entire web and that how many of the clicks we make online are controlled by Google…

Gmail

Quite simply by far the best email platform in the world. Embraced by millions it has changed the way many of us communicate. Google opened up the email market by pretty much doing away with the worry of storage meaning you would never have to delete an email again.

Google Maps

This has been around for a good while now but really took over many of our lives when they installed it on to phones and mobile applications. It used to be a case of a printed off address with scrawled directions but now many of us navigate around the world with the help of Google maps.

Google News

Google news is one of the service that angers so many traditional media and was launched in 2002 by Google. The front page of Google news is controlled not by editors but by the aggregation algorithm. This is one of the main sources of news for many on a daily basis.

Google Earth

I’ve never had a personal day to day use for this myself but there is no doubt that you can amuse yourself for hours looking around for stuff near where you live or work. The fact that you can view it on phones with maps or different types of terrain offers lots of different experiences to different users.

Google Apps

We run our whole business on Google apps and there are many around the world who do exactly the same. With all documents and applications stored in the cloud you can be a little at the mercy of “the cloud” but Google is very rarely down and the collaboration opportunities that Google Apps present are immense.

Google Chat

Essentially part of Gmail or Google apps this is the chat or IM choice of many. Recent features have included the adding of video calling and it is appealing over other IM providers because it works with lots of other Google products.

Youtube

This one really doesn’t need much explaining as I’m sure every single one of the readers here will have used Youtube at some stage, probably today. Since Google bought the video sharing site for $1.5 billion the site has continued to grow massively but they have struggled to make money from it.

Google Alerts

Small but useful little product that many people depend on to keep them alerted of personal or brand mentions. Has started to come under pressure form more sophisticated products in recent times but but still used on a daily basis by millions of people.

Android

Only a couple of years since Google bought Android but it has fast become one of the most important operating systems in the world. Google was very smart to recognize that a large volume of searches would be taking place on mobiles in the future and building their own operating system was a very smart way of making sure everybody would continue to use all the Google products we see here on their phones as well as computers.

Google Chrome

My own personal browser of choice as it is lightening fast and incredibly simplistic and stripped of all the bells and whistles that I just don’t need. The chrome browser has been growing and again is a great way of Google making sure that all their products are front and center.

Picasa

A photo sharing site that Google had great hopes for but seems to have fallen by the wayside in terms of growth when compared to Flickr and Facebook. Anybody can log in with their own Google account and post photos. Sadly for Google I just see no reason for the vast majority of users to switch form any of their bigger photo sharing sites and I can’t see Picasa doing anything great in the future.

Orkut

Another purchase that Google made hoping to break in to the social landscape. They bought it when Facebook was still small enough and there was hope that it could compete and although it does still enjoy some success in countries like Brazil the long term future is threatened by the big blue ship that is Facebook.

Blogger

Google bought Blogger for Ev Williams (of Twitter fame) and in doing so control one of the biggest blogging platforms on the planet. A direct competitor to Wordpress it is used by millions of bloggers all over the world to either host their free blogs or to power their own personal domains.

Feedburner

Google set out to control even more of the information flow when they acquired Feedburner a couple of years ago. Feedburner powers many of the RSS feeds on blogs around the world and is another great source of data for Google.

Google Calendar

Many of us who use either Google Apps or Gmail will depend on Google Calendar to organize our daily lives. Again the collaboration tools means that you can share your meetings with others and the fact that it syncs up with many popular mobile platforms means accessing your Google Calendar on the go is easy.

Adsense

This has been a god send to publishers all over the world interested in gaining revenue from their websites or blogs. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites and this really is one of the main engines behind Google’s huge growth.

Google Reader

Again quite another techie tool that doesn’t appeal to the masses but does have a huge amount of the online community using it. Essentially an RSS reader that allows you to pull in the latest blog posts and Google Reader is the first stop online for many looking to pull in the latest information.

Google Analytics

Google were very smart early on in that they knew their self serving advertising platform was a huge success but for it to continue to add value to their customers they would need top quality analytics which is why they introduced Google Analytics. Used by millions around the world this does everything you would want from a web analytics package.

Google Ventures

Google Ventures is the venture capital investment arm of Google Inc. that makes strategic investments in technology companies. Google also makes some investments through the main company but ventures was set up as a stand alone entity that was meant to make money and act as a VC.

Adwords

This is the reason that Google can afford to make all the other products on this list. In the early days Google was an amazing search engine but it was only when Google introduced the Adwords advertising system that the cash really started to flow. Google Adwords is literally a money making machine with Google acting as the ultimate middle man for billions worth of online transactions every year.

Google Voice

This is a service that has been making waves in recent times and many see it as the future of telephone communication. The service allows you to receive calls through various phones and has even been integrated in to Gmail in recent times. Google took a long time to integrate Grand Central (the company that founded the service) in to a fully fledged Google product but it is starting to get some serious traction now.

Double Click

Google bought the biggest Internet ad serving network in 2008 and the deal attracted the attention of US lawmakers as it was deemed a potential monopoly but the deal did go through in the end. Although there has been lots of controversy this continues to be one of the most important parts of Google’s business.

iGoogle

For many this is the first page they will arrive on when they start their browser. iGoogle can be customized using widgets and RSS to create a customized landing page tailored to all your own personal interests. Again this is another great example of Google controlling another part of the web and making sure that consumers can reach their products front and center.

Google Search

If Google didn’t provide such good search results they wouldn’t be able to monetize with the adwords platform so effectively. For over 10 years Google have been working at constantly improving their search results and the reason over 70 of users prefer Google is because the results they provide are so relevant and the information is nearly always spot on.

Webmaster Tools

An essential tool for all web publishers who want to see information about how their site is seen in the eyes of the mighty Google. Lots of useful tools in there including ways to analyze your keywords, incoming links and tips on how to improve your site and find broken pages.

Book Search

This is one of the biggest projects that Google has ever undertaken and involves scanning as many books as Google can get their hands on and making them indexable in their search engines. Copyright issues have always raised their head

Google Check Out

Check out is the service that Google provides to merchants and websites to sell goods online. The service continues to grow and is the main competitor to Paypal. Google has the power to push check out in to many different places online and it is a product that can contribute some decent revenue to Google’s coffers.

Google Finance

Not a tool that is used by more professional investors but given the fact that so many eyeballs are on Google they can offer stock prices and graphs to many who search for them. All sorts of financial information including currencies, equities and all the latest final news in one central hub.

Google Video

This was started before Google purchased Youtube but for some reason it hangs around in the background today. Users can still upload videos to Google video as well as searching through millions of videos on the service but it is really hard to see any viable long term option for Google Video.

Google Trends

This is a product that is based on the main Google search and that helps show what it happening in the world based on search trends. Google trends is a tool used by many for research and is broken

Nexus One

This was Google’s foray in to making and selling a phone from scratch and it didn’t really work out great for them. Also known as “the Google phone” it was sold online and did receive rave reviews although Google seem to have gone back to building the Android operating system and forgotten about this particular business model.

Google Street View

This is the product that makes waves in ever country it launches in with crystal clear images of people’s houses and funny pictures around the world of every day things happening. Apart from being a laugh for us punters Google Streetview is also a very serious product that could have huge potential revenue possibilities in the future for everything from directions to shopping.

Google Products You’ll Depend On In The Future?

It’s clear from above that we already depend on lots of Google products but where are the products of the future that we will depend on. Just how much of our daily lives will Google control and crucially will it be able to generate even more revenues from the things we do in our daily life. Here is a look at some of the major products in the near future from Google that we could all be using on a daily basis.

Google TV

This is the latest product that Google have been trying to get off the ground with the main reason being that Google are obsessed with getting in to the TV ad sales game and opening up a new revenue stream. This will certainly be a longer play and the battle will be with Apple and other players coming in to the market and it will certainly be a hard nut to crack.

Google Cars

News emerged last week that Google had been testing cars that could drive themselves in what seems like one of the biggest diversions in strategy that Google have embarked upon. The logic that Google have is that consumers with more spare time in their cars will have more time to spend on their products.

Google Alternative Energy

Google are always trying to play up their green credentials (just don’t ask about how many servers they use) and the latest move has been a move to find alternative energy. Is this a PR move? A bid on the next energy gold rush or simply trying to expand their business empire. Nobody can be quite sure what Google have planned in this area but they seem to be quite serious about things.

Google Me?

This hasn’t even been announced yet or even confirmed by Google but it is clear that Google are gearing up to launch some sort of social media platform that could take on Facebook. It’s a very big debate as to if they could take the world’s biggest social network on but Google are certainly throwing lots of money at the problem that is Facebook looming large on their radar.

Google High Speed Internet

Google have for a long time been making noise about getting super speed broadband out to users and they have indeed been testing this at different times. The logic on this one again is that if they can speed up the Internet that people use then there will be more searches which will result in more revenues for them. Very much a long term play but I can’t argue with faster connections myself.

Google Goggles

I’ll let the video do a lot of the talking on this one because it really is a very impressive product. Make no mistake that people are already using this but the real future of this product will be seen in years to come when it is embraced by a bigger audience.

Some Google Products That Didn’t Quite Make It

With Google launching so many products it is inevitable that many of them are going to fail. Some have failed because they didn’t get the right attention while some were flat our bad ideas…

Google Gears

Touted as a great new way to view websites and applications offline this service was much hyped at the start but ran in to trouble and actually shut down earlier this year. Google does still offer some support for Gears so as not to break sites but it is to all extents and purposes dead as a product,

Jaiku

In some ways Jaiku was very similar to twitter and the two services came to market at around the same time but for whatever reason Twitter just exploded and Jaiku was left with a core of passionate users and new owners in Google but the service has died a death and is now looked after by people through the open source community and it is another one to add to the list of start ups that Google acquired and pretty much killed off.

Google Wave

This was the much hyped new way of communicating that Google launched just over a year ago but quickly shut down when they realized it was just a complicated mess that no sane person wanted to touch. It really did crash and burn in record time and what was worrying for Google here is that such a short time ago they were trumpeting it as the replacement for email. Didn’t quite pan out that way.

Dodgeball

This is an interesting one and one that Google will surely be annoyed with now given the huge rise in location based services. Dodgeball was created by the current founders of Foursquare but after being bought by Google was essentially parked and allowed to die. Fast forward a couple of years and the founders left Google, founded their own new company (Foursquare) and are valued around the $100 million mark and the envy of many.

Google Buzz

Another foray by Google in to the social sphere that has not quite worked out to plan. The service was launched earlier this year and meant to be something that could compete with the likes of Twitter given the fact that it sat within Gmail and had access to 170 million users. Didn’t really work out that way and most people just saw it as yet more noise that they just didn’t need.

Conclusion

As you can see from the list above there is a huge amount of products that Google has that we all use on a daily basis and the list is getting longer by the day. Not all of them make money yet but it is clear that Google is looking for lots of new ways to compliment it’s already huge core business of search and the ads around those searches. Google is a huge tech company and I am impressed by the levels of innovation they continue to achieve. Let me know if I have missed any products out here because given the sheer volume it wouldn’t be a surprise.

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