June 5, 2006

Top 10 Out-of-beta Google Products

Most Google products are in beta, or even in alpha (the products from Google Labs). Well, there are some services and software almost finished, that doesn't carry the famous Google label: beta. Here's my list of top 10 out-of-beta Google products:

10. Google Alerts
http://www.google.com/alerts
Mostly used by spammers to post something on Blogger and by SEO companies to monitor ranking changes.

9. Image Search
http://images.google.com
If you want to find great photos you'll definitely go to Flickr. Google Images is a good place to find celebrity photos, screenshots and landscapes.

8. Google News
http://news.google.com
Google News shows the latest news and groups the articles by topics. Unfortunately it doesn't do a great job at clustering news.

7. Blogger
http://www.blogger.com
It was the most popular blogging, until MSN Spaces became the leader. It was a cool place to read blogs until spammers invaded the teritory. It was one of the blogging pioneers, until Blogger stopped innovating.

6. Picasa
http://www.picasa.com
A very easy to use photo management tool that's free, thanks to Google.

5. Google Analytics (by invitation only)
http://www.google.com/analytics
Google Analytics, the former Urchin, is a great tool to analyze the traffic of a site. It has nice charts, powerful data and sometimes very few Google servers to handle so many users.

4. Google Maps
http://maps.google.com
Now that Google has maps and satellite imagery for United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and almost the entire world, the success of the product is guaranteed.

3. Google Earth
http://earth.google.com
Everybody loves Google Earth: it's like making the tour of the world from your armchair.

2. Google Ads (AdSense + AdWords)
http://www.google.com/ads
Simple, unobtrusive, targeted - Google ads made Google a profitable business and helped small sites to develop and big sites to have a more pleasant look.

1. Web Search
http://www.google.com
The core product, out of beta in September 1998. Behind the simple, uncluttered, clean design, you could find a powerful search engine able to give relevant results fast. Although the problem of search wasn't completely solved, Google has the best search engine and that's their flagship.

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