Inbound Google: 7 Google Tools you forgot about

Two weeks ago, I was going through my Google products and I just realized how much Google has supplied us or at least me with quality inbound tools that benefit us personally and professionally. And Google has done this for us to make our lives that much easier and that much more effective. The tools that Google has allowed any business to flourish and even the big guns have joined the party.  There are so many tools that Google has introduced, that I even forgot about some of them. You can use Google tools for almost everything you can think of, there is G+ the social media platform, Google Docs which allows you to save and share documents and other functionality, Google play where you can save your music and share it with your friends. This is me is one of the many reasons why I will follow Google most of the directions they take. Because they not only add value to me, but to my business. 

Here are the top 7 Google tools that are forgotten. 

1. Google Trends

When this tool was released, every marketer rushed to use it including myself and now that we have dashboards and other tools that are a one shop stop, we forgot about this useful tool. Google Trends compare the "world's interest" in certain words and topics, which charts the number of times a word or phrase appeared on the web over time. This tool is great for checking out the history of popular neologisms and brand names (like iPhone or iPad). You can also pit terms against one another. 

2. Google Alerts

This tool makes your web search results come to you, through email notifications that list the new web pages your search terms pop up on, real-time. Google Alerts automatically hands your searches every morning and you can search for any topic and if you want results for several items, separate them with a pipe (|) or combine terms with AND, like Cape Town AND Fashion Week. 

3. Google Book Search

I used to use this quite a bit when I was in college and this was a great tool to have. And this is what Google Book Search is good for, developing a ever growing digital library all the time. Flip through pages of the books scanned into Book Search, and add books to your personal virtual library as well. Along those same lines, academics won't want to forget about Google Scholar for searching papers, theses, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint  repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. 

4. Google Notebook

We all find snippets of web pages, quotes, and images all over the web we want to copy to a personal library, and Google Notebook is a powerful way to do just that. Whether you're researching a particular project, capturing ideas as you come across them online, this is a very powerful tool. 

5. Google Sketch Up

I once had aspirations to become an architect and I used to create wonderful 3D images using Google Sketchup modeling program. It lets anyone become a virtual architect and you can design your dream house, office space or skyscraper. 

6. Google Code Search

Mostly of interest only to programmers, Google Code Search is a pretty incredible mechanism for finding and browsing the innnards of countless open source projects. Use the lang: operator to limit your search results to a certain language, and search by developer name, file name, or comments. 

7. Google Page Creator

I remember when this was launched a lot of home based businesses used it and it was incredible, that someone who sells jam or has a local Bed & Breakfast  would have a space where they could post their pictures and other data for people to see. And this site creation tool hosts up to 100MB of files for free. Truly amazing. 

There are a million (okay just exaggerating, maybe hundreds) other tools that one can use to either enhance your online experience through Google and to make your business profitable using Google tools or apps. I love using Google tools for various reason, but three that is at the top of the list, is that they are reliable, easy to use, and most of them are free. So for any business that is still providing mediocre service and claim that they don't have the funding to purchase proper software, your excuse just became LAME.