15 Awesome Google Services You Never Knew Existed
Posted 02/25/2010 at 3:04pm
| by Florence Ion

Learn HTML all over again
Code SearchFor the web coder with frequent bouts of brain freeze, Google’s Code Search is truly a lifesaver. If you’re writing CSS or attempting to bypass Flash with a very concise HTML 5 tag, you can cross reference any line of code by copying and pasting it into the search engine.

Find exactly what you're looking for
Similar Images
Google Labs' Similar Images is basically a harder-working version of the search engine’s already massive Image Search. If you’re looking for very specific image, like a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the south end, search for "Golden Gate Bridge", then select the image that most resembles the one you're looking for. Each click refines your search down to eventually what you're looking for.

Watch as your image search dances around you
Image Swirl
Similar Images may eventually get you the photo you want, but what if the image you’re really looking for can only be sought out using a phonetics algorithm? Image Swirl organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups based on their visual and semantic similarities--kind of like how mind-mapping works.
Type in three search terms and you’ll be amazed at how the internal script behind the engine works to match an image with each of your descriptions. You can select the photo of each individual cluster for closer review, or the images surrounding it. We should note that Image Swirl is the newest addition to the Beta family, and is greatly limited in its search capabilities.

Peruse news on the web a dozen pages at a time
Fast Flip
If you’re always on the go and out of the loop, a visit to Google's Fast Flip should do the trick. It does exactly as it advertises: view screenshots of the most important news outlets on the web all at once. Or for a more refined selection of news based on topic, type in a search term and Fast Flip will retrieve a number of the most relevant sources from a predefined list of sources. You can also cycle through the news based on the most popular, recent, viewed and recommended headlines around the internet, or categorize the news by section and most discussed topics. There’s also a mobile version for iPhone users.

Refine your bibliography
Scholar
Writing a term paper is already a grueling task, so why make it more difficult by trolling the Internet for unreliable sources? Google’s got you covered with Scholar, which searches the works of academic scholars who have chosen to openly share their published writings online.
Of course, as with all academic and published works, don’t forget to cite what you use!

Find the best deals
Product Search
You may remember it as Froogle, but Google Product Search has since evolved into something quite extraordinary, even if it is still in beta. Type in a product query, and this search engine will return a list of sites offering the product of your choice, at the price of your choice. Perhaps the best thing about Product Search is that it makes absolutely no commission off of what you buy, so you can rest assured it’s just a clean, simple search engine for the best deals on the web.

Discover what’s trending on the web
Trends
No, we're not talking about Twitter. Google Trends is like the popularity gauge for the Internet. For example, if you're curious to see how certain car companies fare against each other in terms of search frequency, type in two search terms separated by commas and Google will retrieve a graph detailing the statistical difference between the two search terms. The graph also shows regions, cities, and languages with which the search term is most popular, and the recent stories that picked up the most traffic from Google.

Trace the genealogy of your friendships
People HopperYou may share more
similarities with your friends than you think. No, we don’t mean
interests and hobbies; we’re talking about eye shapes, nose bumps,
freckles and moles. Google’s People Hopper proves that everyone shares a
little something by “morphing” your profile image with a friend’s and
displaying the transformation breakdown, picture-by-picture, in a neat
spectrum graph.
The service borrows its photos and user
accounts from Orkut, so you’ll have to have an active account to use
this service. Choose a friend who’s also on the social networking
service and People Hopper will return with the facial breakdown between
you and your comrade--and a bunch of other people floating around the
web. The quality of the path between faces depends on how closely the
two photos match. Even if it’s not a true-to-form match, it’s
interesting to see as each photo descends from the primary match and
morphs into another user. Plus, it’s a great way to meet new people, or
find that long lost brother of yours.
Honestly, People Hopper is
a little creepy, but incredibly enticing all at the same time. If you
want to opt out of being a part of Google’s under-the-radar
anthropological experiments,
follow
these instructions.

Meet
some new people
Orkut
Orkut
is a free-access social networking service designed to help you quell
your Facebook addition. The service is incredibly popular in India and
Brazil, but severely lagging behind Myspace and Facebook in the United
States.
If you use the service with People Hopper, maybe you'll run
into someone who looks like you in India and Brazil. You never know.