Google Gets It

Google gets it when it comes to making online search a breeze. By creating an algorithm based on relevancy and recency Google search became a household name. How many times have you said, "Google it" in reference to an online search? To quote William Leaker in his article published in Adotas on Nov 19, 2008, "Google now owns a vast percentage of what could be described as the 'content discovery' market."

And Google gets it that a company can never rest on its laurels. With products like Google Adsense and Google Analytics it provided a single source for advertisers to track how well their keywords are doing and modify their website strategy by tracking website visitor behavior. Google has also recently added the ability to track the number of hits on flash media on websites. During the past several years, I have used Google's competitive products - Webtrends, HitBox/Visual Sciences. I find Google Analytics more user-friendly, highly intuitive and actionable. I set up goals for my company's website and am able to track how well our keywords are doing and track conversion rates, visitor loyalty, bounce rates and how marketing activities are impacting visits and conversions. Through its AppExchange, Google has also provided integration into SalesForce.com's CRM so that all the actionable reporting is in one place.

Other Google's services are: Google Maps which are far better than Mapquest in getting driving directions and Google Earth gives us a view of any address in the world that we typed in.

Let's face it, when most of us are surfing the Net, we don't want to spend too much time looking for information. So, to make it easy to stay abreast of topics that interested us, Google gave us the ability to set up alerts on Google News, so we could get notifications when the keywords we selected appeared in any news media.

Its recent product Google Reader is an online RSS feed reader by Google, which allows you to share combined feeds of shared, starred or tagged feeds. You can create your own dashboard so that you are getting updates on your favorite sites and blogs fed directly to your Google home page. Or, if you prefer to use your blog home page instead of Google's, by downloading the widget, you can create your dashboard on your blog home page. See http://www.google.com/reader

Just when you think it could not get any better, Google gets it right again. Its newest product SearchWiki gives you the ability to personalize and markup your searches so that you control the rankings of your search results. See http://www.adotas.com//2008/11/google-personalizes-search-results/

The fact that Google offers all these services at no charge makes it even more appealing. Yes, Virginia, there really is a free lunch! All that, with the convenience of having it on one page suits me just fine.