Google

A LL A BOUT G OOGLE
Test Drive
These Tools
The Newest Ideas Are At Google Labs
As you can see from the size
of this issue, Google includes
many features beyond
its original, basic Web
search engine. Google now includes
an image-search tool, links to news
headlines, newsgroups, and more.
Even with so many existing tools,
though, Google engineers are not
content. They continue to develop
new tools that may become standard
Google features in the future. In
Google Labs (labs.google.com), you
can try out the latest ideas from the
folks at Google.
Lab Work
Google launched its Labs site in
May 2002. The first tools users could
try out were Google Glossary (a quick
way to find definitions), Google Voice
Search (a phone-based search tool),
Google Sets (which creates a full list
of related items from a few examples),
and Google Keyboard Shortcuts
(which let users browse search results
using a keyboard rather than a
mouse). Of these four original Google
Labs experiments, two still exist.
Google Glossary is now a standard
Google feature. Google Sets still exists,
but it has never left Google Labs.
It is still officially an unsupported
“experiment” of a Google engineer.
The tools on Google Labs pages are
nothing more than prototypes designed
by Google employees. The
Labs tools are not necessarily products
that will ever become full-fledged
Google services. In fact, at any time, a
Google Labs feature may disappear or
change significantly. According to
Google, a tool may disappear from
Google Labs for many reasons. Often,
users find that a prototype just
isn’t stable yet or doesn’t work well
enough to remain on the Google Labs
page. Sometimes, Google notes that a
certain Google Labs project doesn’t
elicit many clicks, and Google will remove
the tool for lack of interest.
Occasionally, Google must temporarily
remove a feature from the
Google Labs page because it is so popular
that the vast amounts of Web
traffic it creates cause problems for
Google’s servers. Sometimes vanishing
Google Labs prototypes will
reappear after further development,
but other times, Google simply abandons
an idea and it never returns.
These tools are often not as polished
as more established, official
Google features, such as Google
Images or Froogle. You may occasionally
find a Google Labs project
On the Google Labs page, you can try
out several experimental tools that
Google has not officially launched.
that doesn’t work as expected or that
doesn’t work at all. Remember that
the Google Labs tools are experiments
and that they are still in development.
Google does provide the means to
communicate any problems or praise
to the tool’s engineer. We will discuss
this in more detail later in this article.
Finally, we should also note that
Google Labs projects may be slow to
Reference Series / Guide To Using Google 17