had their Press Day today, which included the announcement of 4 new products:

Google Trends
Google Desktop 4
Google Co-op
Google Notebook

My comments:

Google Trends (not yet online) will let you look at the frequency a given word or phrase is entered into Google as a search query. This idea is nothing new. Online marketers will all recognize the Overture and Wordtracker keyword suggestion tools. Google itself maintains Google Zeitgeist which lists some most-searched keywords for previous months. But Google Trends will allow people to search for whichever keywords they want. It will give the world a better metric for topic popularity than anything else yet available - Technorati and Alexa rankings being the old primary sources for that information.

The new Google Desktop features something called Gadgets, which includes a sidebar that fits on your desktop. I just installed it and found most of the gadgets entirely useless. It has an analog clock - I don’t need an analog clock because there is the digital clock in the bottom-left corner of the screen. It comes with a power bar indicator - this isn’t too useful because my laptop is rarely unplugged. It comes with a widget that shows a feed of Google news - I don’t need this because I can look at the news through Bloglines and rather wouldn’t be distracted by news in a sidebar. There is a new email display box - this isn’t too useful for me because I don’t use gmail and so spam that normally would get filtered into a spam folder is instead displayed in sidebar. And so on. Also, I found that when the sidebar was installed and made itself at home on the right side of my screen, it pushed aside all the icons that were there previously, shoving them unceremoniously to the left of the screen! Is this a metaphor for how Google is infringing upon the Microsoft space now? ;)

Part of the announcement was that an API will be released so that anyone can produce their own gadgets. This could end up being useful. I also haven’t yet checked out all the available gadgets - perhaps some are actually worth installing. But my initial impression of this sidebar is lukewarm. Maybe this new Google Desktop will be appealing to people that don’t know about RSS feeds and have to be introduced to them through this sort of a medium. The Google Calendar and Google Video plugins certainly look enticing.

Google Co-op I don’t quite understand yet. It’s supposed to have something to do with improving your search results with the authoritative input of people and organizations. We have yet to see how this plays out, but again I am slightly skeptical. Do we want to bias our search results in favor of the opinions of people and organizations? I guess that will be our choice.

Google Notebook is a really cool idea. Basically it’s a browser plugin that hovers in the bottom-left hand corner of the browser and you can drag text and images into it. This creates a personalized “notebook”, which can then be shared publicly at your desire. Out of all the introduced products, this is probably the simplest and in my eyes the most potentially useful. It will be out next week in Google Labs.