Free 411 and Other Handy Google Experiments

THE GRADUATES

1-800-GOOG-411 – I’ve been using this service for a few months now. It’s vioce automated and gives you much more than normal directory service can provide. The best part: it’s free!

Google Notebook – Google Notebook allows you to take clips of the internet and save them to one location via your browser. I haven’t tried this yet but my turn off was having to sign up for another service. Maybe soon as I plan to do research for books and educational purposes. It seems like a better way to organize your favorites and domain information for later use.

Docs & Spreadsheets – This is a service offered in the past by a company named Writely which allowed excel spreadsheets online. This is handy if you ever want to backup your domain list or need to access the list on a different computer. (Google bough Writely and now directly provides this service).

Google Alerts – Alerts you of news on a particular keyword or phrase. Handy if you want certain trends/news/events to appear in your inbox at a specific time. It helps you beat the crowd with domain registrations.

ON EXPERIMENT

Experimental Search – Google seems to be rolling out with better search results to compete with Ask.com and MSN.com (as if they had to catch up!). You can organize data in a timeline, on a map and there’s an “info view” feature that sorts information by date, measurement, timeline and images. A definite improvement on search delivery. To try the different search features, click the above link. If you want to be a guine pig in the experiment, click on the “Join This Experiment” button next to “Alternate views for search results” title and Google.com will change to the experimental version.

Music Trends – Keep up with music trends for fan club related domains. Search by genres or countries. Stay away from copyright infringement.

Google Trends – Find out what other people are searching for charted into search volume, regions, cities and languages. You can sort out current information or date it back.

Page Creator – For the non-web-designers, Google is experimenting with a page creator service.

Know any other useful Google tools? Leave a comment here.