Hotel Finder

Google now offers an experimental tool called hotel finder. See Barry Schwartz’s writeup in Search Engine Land.

What Do You Love?

Google launched a new site called What Do You Love? .

Entering a query will yield a plethora of results from Google’s myriad services: Blogger, Books, Picasa, YouTube, Earth, etc.

Read more about it here in PC Magazine.

In sum, this tool is Google-centric.

Google Music Beta

Check out this cloud-based music service from Google called Music Beta.

Better yet, watch this video introduction:

Google Video: Instant Previews

According to The Official Google Blog, the search engine now offers an Instant Preview feature for videos.

Look for the magnifying glass next to the title of the video and click on it; you should be able to watch 4 brief segments of the entire video.

See also the writeup of this development from Search Engine Watch.

Don’t Be Evil! New Google Video

This video may make you laugh, or it may induce a panic attack:

Google Images

Google has taken a cue from Bing and revamped Google Images.  According to the Official Google blog, Google Images now indexes more than 10 billion images. Users will see less whitespace in the results page and be able to view up to 1,000 images in the results. Furthermore, searchers can obtain information about images by mousing over them.

Cool Google Tip

I just learned that Google can quickly tell you the times of sunrise and sunset for a particular location.

Type in the following in the search box, for instance: “sunrise chicago”.

Here’s what you’ll see.

Give Google a Facelift

Though this new Google feature does nothing to enhance search results and functionality, it’s definitely aesthetic; it’s easy on the eyes. Specifically, Google now allows users to add a background image to the Google start page or home page. Users can choose images from their hard drives, Picasa Web albums, public images, and editors’ picks. Here’s a link to the instructions.

Explore Google Search

Google – - perhaps in response to Bing and Wolfram Alpha – - has created a page called Explore Google Search to tout its cool features and tools. The page highlights using Google as a dictionary, calculator, unit converter, and more. Video tutorials and graphical examples are provided. See, for instance, this video (in the series 15-second Search Tips) on Google’s public data feature:

Google Search Options

Watch this video about some new Google features — “Google Search Options”:

New ways to slice and dice as well as refine search results . . . by facets, content type, etc.

The video says and illustrates it all; what more could I add?