Google Art

We covered this super cool experiment back in February. The Google Art Project leverages Google Street View mapping imagery to give users virtual tours of art in museums around the world.

We enjoyed this Q&A service even before Google acquired it in February 2010. We’d like to see it stick around and for Google to make use of it, preferably with some integration with Google+.

Google Correlate, basically the seed for Google Flu Trends, finds search patterns that correspond with real-world trends. It’s a statistics tool that lets users compare Google searches. Its lots of fun and even helpful to show what is hot and what is not.

We’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that Goggles, the visual search application will be one of the survivors. It’s the bedrock for visual search on Android and iPhone smartphones as well as the new image search feature on the desktop.

This is an Android application, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that it will be saved. Gesture Search lets users find a contact, an application, a bookmark or something else on an Android phone by drawing alphabet gestures on the touch-screen.

This cool application lets users type more efficiently by providing related word or phrase completion suggestions. It also checks documents for incorrect phrases, punctuation and misspellings.

Similar in construct to Google Correlate, when users enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in books over the number of years users select. The viewer crawls 500 billion words from 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. This is a really interesting tool for linguistics researchers.

Google Body Browser provides 3D views of the human body. It’s excellent for medical students, we believe. Click on body parts to search for muscles, organs, bones and more.

Need to create a topic for discussion on the Web. Google Moderator lets users create a series about something they want to discuss and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas or suggestions. This was a 20 percent time product—which means it was created with the 20 percent of working time that Google encourages its people to use for personal development and experimentation.

Need to find a parking space in a crowded lot? Try Open Spot, which lets users leaving parking spots share their spots with people who are searching for parking, all via their Android smartphone. Many Googlers use this to park at the vast Googleplex. This won’t necessarily curb parking-spot rage, however.