Google Services

Over some years, Google has added more services to its repertoire, either through innovation, or through buying over other companies.

Google Groups was created in early 2001, when Google acquired Deja.com Usenet newsgroup archive,formerly known as DejaNews.com. With entries dating back top 1995, greatly increasing the scope of its search engine.

That same year,the Google Phone Book was also introduced, which served as online yellow pages. In the middle of that year, Google also introduced a multi language function which allowed its users to select any of 40 non-English language versions of Google to search with.

Google's Image Search function launched in Mid 2001 & allowed users to search for images through Google. It claims to search 425 million images and 3 billion websites.

Google Toolbar is an application which integrates itself into web browser toolbars and allows users to utilize Google search functions without accessing the Google homepage.

Google Zeitgeist, launched in Mid 2001 allowed users to follow search trends by displaying the most popular search topics.

Google unveiled Google Catalogue search towards the end of 2001, which provided users with more than a thousand online mail order catalogues.

Google News, was introduced in March 2002. It is a continuously updated news archive dredged from news sites around the world. This was followed by a year end Google News beta release, which was the first ever online news site compiled completely by computer algorithms.

Froogle was also released in 2002, and it enabled users to search the web for products to purchase.

Blogger, a popular weblog site became a Google service when Google bought over the company which runs it, Pyra Labs in, 2003. The Search by Location service was also introduced, which allows users to find information by geographic location. The Google New Alerts Services was also launched. This service sends emails to subscribers alerting them on the latest listings on Google News.

GMail was released on the 1st of April 2004. The email service, which provides a Gigabyte of storage space, has been received with mixed reactions; some praise the service for its innovative interface and large amount of storage, and others going up in arms over privacy issues (Bass, S., 2004).

Orkut.com went online in 2004. It is an online community and social networking service, not unlike Friendster. There is talk that Google wants to get grab a share of the growing online community and social networking pie, which the company has not commented on (Sullivan, D., 2004).

Google Earth allow users to search for images of specific areas of the surface of Earth and includes three dimensional mapping of some urban areas.

Google Maps provide users with maps, satellite images, locations of desired services, and provides step-by-step directions to and from specified locations।

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