Google Products You Might Not Know About

I don’t know about you, but I use quite a few of Google’s products daily. Yet there are some Google products even I didn’t know about. Some are very helpful and a few are just plain bizarre.

Fortunately, like most of Google’s products, these products are free, paid for by people who click on their search results page ads. Following is a list (in no particular order) of some products you may not know about:

• Google Takeout: Sounds like Google’s food delivery service doesn’t it? This tool allows you to download an archive of your data from things like your +1?s, Google+ Circles, Contacts and Picasa Web albums. It can be handy to keep a backup of some of your Google information.
• Google Mars: While less well known than Google Earth, Google Mars gives you the ability to check out spacecraft landing locations, crater depth and even comes with an infrared option. What it lacks in notoriety it makes up for in space geeky coolness.
• Google SketchUp: This product certainly may fall into the ‘incredibly useful’ category of Google products. Google SketchUp allows you to create anything in 3D, from coffee pots to skyscrapers. You can check out the community gallery for added inspiration.
• Google Correlate: Big data is a big topic. Correlate allows you to find patterns within data samples. Google Correlate uses web search activity data to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The results can be viewed on the Google Correlate website or downloaded as a CSV file for further analysis.
• Google Sites: Sites is simply Google’s version of a Wiki. We know of one agent who uses Sites to create a private portal for each client that contains account and policy information. This could be a good option to create any type of website.
• Google Places (formerly HotPot): This is Google’s version of Yelp.com, providing food reviews and restaurant recommendations. It is part of Google Places. 
However, it does not seem that very many people use it. I don’t, do you?
• What Do You Love?: New last year, this mysterious service is a simple search box, similar to the one on Google’s homepage, but it returns results from more than 20 different Google services, including Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps, and Groups. 
Results are presented in little boxes that can, in some cases, be expanded by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner.
• YouTube Feather: YouTube Feather is a “light” version of YouTube that aims to take the strain away from your browser and Internet connection.
• Panoramio: A photo-sharing community that invites people to share their pictures of the world mashed up over the Google Maps tool.

So, how many of these did you know about? Some of these tools are certainly more useful than others, but it could be worth your time exploring these lesser known Google tools.