Shopping Guide and Reviews

Google is sometimes misled with the term “search,” which is the center of our day-to-day computing. The company has achieved a market cap of $183 billion, which is about 71% of the total value of much more established archrival Microsoft.

However, Google has enlarged its domain beyond stellar search, and keeps increasing its bundle of free tools or applications that enable users to communicate, manage multimedia, map trips and even create virtual worlds. With such huge resources in hand, the company had released about fifty new products in last two months.

Recently, the company has acquired various companies like AdMob, Gizmo5, Teracent and AppJet to increase its revenue outside search-based ads business.

Search Share

In the recent market share for November, Google remained the dominant leader with 65.6% share, whereas Yahoo and Bing reported 17.5% and 10.3% share in the November. Microsoft and Yahoo had joined hands in the search to thrash Google’s monopoly in the search.

Now, the company has moved from its search fort and is trying in various fields like apps, programming language, mobile phones, operating systems, cloud apps and many more.

Here, the feature discusses some of the products recently launched by Google. However, the question is; Whether Google succeeds outside of search?

Google Phone: Nexus One

The company has been planning for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market via its own branded handset, called “Nexus One.” According to various analysts, it will be one of the most advanced Smartphones present in the market with Android OS and will directly challenge Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry in the sector. Recently, Google gave employees an Android handset for testing that can search the Web by speaking search terms.

Google Android OS

Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. It was launched back in 2007 especially for mobile devices, but now many PC vendors are planning to introduce Android based netbooks.

In the recent data for November month, Android claimed 27% share in the market, whereas iPhone OS reported 55% share in the Smartphone market in US.

Google Chrome OS

Google has released the source code for its browser based operating system, called Chromium OS, which will target the small and low power PCs like netbooks that have shown positive growth during the recession. Further, the new systems based on the OS are strictly for cloud computing and they will be connected to the web via Wi-Fi and will play only web-based applications such as Google Docs. Also, all the data will be stored in cloud not in users’ netbook. Hence, users do not require much storage in their PC.

Google Apps

It features several Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs, Picasa, Google Earth and Sites. Google redefined the concept of Cloud Computing and developed applications that made migration easier for users from pre installed applications to cloud based services.

Google Dashboard

Google Inc, the search giant has announced that it will provide a window called Google Dashboard to its users so that they can view what data Google is capturing from their activities on 20 products and services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Reader etc.

Google Social Search

In contrast to Microsoft’s Bing-based Twitter search, the new Google search tool will make use of users’ contacts from more than 20 services and other information from your contacts to build up a network, for example Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, data from Google readers and other web based social content.

Google Wave

It is a web-based service, which will merge e-mail, IM, wiki and social networking. Further, it also provides robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages and numerous other extensions. Currently, it is available in a developer preview for sandbox access. Sources suggest that the platform is designed to provide the next generation of Internet communication.