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Google made a number of big(ish) announcements at yesterday's Google Press Day, but isn't that what Press Day is for? The biggest, or at least most fun, announcement was Google Trends, a new project at Google Labs that gives you pretty Alexa-like charts of search activity and Google News articles for the keywords you punch in. The charts are reminiscent of Google Finance, with news articles marked to correspond to points on the chart. By separating them with commas you can specify up to five different keywords to show on the same chart.

Last week I insinuated that Google Health might be among the news, but that was a little off. What Google did launch is Google Co-op, which is two things: First of all, it's a sort of tagging system that allows Google to create "vertical" search engines on specialized topics, e.g. Health. This works by allowing experts and professionals to "label" (i.e. tag) a bunch of URLs and upload them en masse. The tagging end of the equation isn't aimed at end users a la Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (yet), but the results are. Second, Google Co-op does something called "Subscribed Links," which basically allows third parties to create modules that will pop up for relevant searches, much in the way that, say, links to Google Maps currently pop up when you search for something that looks like a location. Currently there aren't very many Subscribed Links available, but they do show what's possible. The Digg subscription, for example, shows you recent popular posts related to your query on Digg along with how many diggs they've gotten. The Fandango subscription shows you movie information and links to tickets and showtimes for movie title queries. I can imagine this becoming really useful.

Google also announced the Beta release of Google Desktop 4. The biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google Gadgets, i.e. widgets. I won't go into too much detail here since widgets are all but ubiquitous these days (see Apple's Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widget Engine). Instead, take a loot at the Gadget library to see what's available. Of course, there's an open API for creating your own, and you can even import some Gadgets from your Personalized Home to Google Desktop 4, and Google will recommend Gadgets for you based on frequent searches.

Lastly, Google is being a little quiet about the last of its announcements, Google Notebook. It's described as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others," but that's about all we know. They could take this in a number of idrections, but it sounds to me a bit like the ScrapBook extension for Firefox, though I'm sure it will have a significant web-based component. Look for Google Notebook to launch next week at Google Labs.