Hello everyone! Last week we published Part I of a run-down on all of Google’s many and varied products. Here’s Part II.

Communications

Google Groups is a discussion group service based in Gmail, also with a separate web interface. Users can start new groups which act like mailing lists; if your office uses Gmail, you’re already using Google Groups every time you email the whole list.

Google Contacts is the service which integrates with apps like Gmail, Drive, and Google Calendars to autocomplete when you start to type someone’s name. It’s a separate service which stores information about the people you communicate with and can be edited and viewed separately from those apps mentioned above.

Google Translate and Google Transliteration make up Google’s Language Tools suite. Most of us have probably used Google Translate before, and it actually provides a fairly decent translation for a free service. What I didn’t know is that you can edit the translations now – hovering over a word in the “translated to” language highlights the corresponding word in the “translated from” language, and clicking brings up a list of potential alternatives to the chosen word. In addition, Google Transliterate doesn’t translate what you type, but reproduces it in another alphabet.

Goo.gl is Google’s link shortener. Use this for tweets or other situations in which you don’t want a lengthy URL. Bonus: Goo.gl can also generate a QR code for any website. You can download an extension for Chrome so that you can shorten sites you’re already on with a single click.

Google Voice is Google’s Voice over IP (VoIP) service. It’s maintained via a web interface or smartphone app and provides free PC-to-phone calling within North America, and PC-to-PC voice/video calling worldwide. Voicemail, text messaging, call history, conference calling, call screening, and transcription of voicemail messages are also available to users within the US. Transcribed or audio voicemails, missed call notifications, and text messages can also be forwarded to an email account.

Techie

Google Analytics Content Experiments is a component of Google Analytics which allows you to test different versions of your site. You can include up to five versions of a page and see how the versions compare to one another for different metrics – visitor traffic, retention, donations, and more. A random sample of site visitors will get each version, and you can choose what percentage of overall visitors see experimental pages.

FeedBurner is similar to Google Reader and other RSS feed services, except that it can also provide statistics on your blog such as how many people subscribe to it, how many reads you have, and so on. Look out, though – there’s speculation that FeedBurner will soon be following in the steps of Google Reader – that is, discontinued.

Google Sites is a wiki- and web page-creation tool which aims to help users build team-oriented sites on which multiple people can collaborate and share files. With the free version, you get 100 MB of storage, but sites are not terribly customizable.

Dart is an open-source web programming language developed by Google. Its (rather bold) goal is to replace JavaScript as the “lingua franca of web development on the open web platform.” It is a class-based, single inheritance, object-oriented language with C-style syntax.

Google Go, also known as Golang, is an open source, compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent system programming language.

Google PageSpeed is a tool designed to help web developers make their sites load faster and work better. It applies a set of best practices and analytics to the site to help optimize its performance.

OpenSocial is a component hosting environment and set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based, mostly social networking applications.

Google Swiffy is a web-based tool that converts Flash SWF files to HTML5 so that Flash content can be displayed on non-Flash-supporting devices.

Google Correlate connects trends in the real world with trends in search terms.

Google Trends shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to total search traffic on Google and through time. It also shows the most frequent related searches, and frequency of the search term by country and language.

Google Tag Manager consolidates the tags used to manage website tracking statistics in different programs. For example, if you’re using AdWords and Analytics, you can update the tags in both with a single Admin panel.

Google Webmaster Tools is a service to help webmasters check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of their sites. Some of the included tools can submit and check a sitemap, list internal and external pages that link to the site, get a list of broken links on the site, and see what keyword searches resulted in the site being listed.

Google Apps Script is a cloud-based scripting language for developing lightweight applications within Google Apps. It’s based on JavaScript 1.8. Basically, it provides an easy way to automate tasks across Google products as well as third party services.

Connecting to Your Community

Google Cars is a service that helps you shop for cars in your area (not driverless ones, just regular ol’ cars). Users can filter by make, model, trim, year, color, style, transmission, and price.

Google Hotel Finder is pretty much what it sounds like – enter a city or specific hotel and the dates you’d like to book, and the service finds rates. You can even search within specific neighborhoods of a city, and reviews of each hotel are included.

Google Movies is a pretty simple location-based show time search engine. Use it to quickly and easily find show times for popular movies at theaters near you.

Panoramio is a geographically-oriented photo sharing website – think Flickr integrated with a map. Photos can be accessed through a Google Earth or Google Maps interface; users can search a place and find images displayed by location.

Google Map Maker enables users to draw roads, railways, rivers, and other features onto maps in which borders have already been drawn but full data is not yet available in Google Maps. The goal is a sort of crowdsourcing of map data to include in Google Maps, though Map Maker is a separate application and data isn’t automatically included.

Google Transit is the public transit-integrated part of getting directions on Google Maps. It’s able to connect you with local bus, subway, and train lines to get you where you need to be on time.

Google TV is a smart TV platform which integrates with Chrome to create an interactive overlay on users’ televisions. Right on the TV screen, users can search the web for content to watch, and Google TV finds and plays it. Users can also shop, view photos, and visit social media sites on Google TV. Google TV comes pre-built in to some new TVs, or a separate box to connect to an older TV is available.

Google Trader is sort of like a Google-based Craigslist. It allows users to post free classifieds for jobs, housing, and goods/services. So far it has only launched in Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, but keep an eye out!

Stuff That is Just Cool                            

Google Patents is a pretty simple search engine specifically for patents, and a great way to find weird inventions.

Google Mars, Google Moon, and Google Sky are basically the outer space versions of Google Earth.

Zygote Body is a web app that renders manipulable 3D models of the human body, including several layers of muscle tissue, blood vessels, organs, bones, and more.

Zeitgeist is a collection of the most frequent search queries for each year since 2001. Recent years are broken down by image, video, people, hashtag, and other searches as well as by country.

Google PowerMeter is an energy monitoring tool. Users can visualize their energy usage, share that data with others, and receive personalized recommendations to reduce their energy consumption.

Tell me about any products I missed in the comments section!
Liz