Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!
In this edition:
- Street View for Google map directions
- Google's PageRank for images: VisualRank
- Stock Screener for Google Finance
- Speaker Notes and YouTube videos for Google Presentations
In its evolution Google Maps has added a number of very fine features, with the addition of Street View to directions on Google Maps fitting in quite nicely. If you search for directions in an area where Street View images are available, you can now see pictures of the turns and intersections on your path to give you a better idea of the route you are going to take. But these sort of things are better understood through video than explained in mere words so Google has been good enough to make one:
Google's PageRank for images: VisualRank
It looks like Google has been dabbling in the art of making algorithms for images, in what may become what PageRank is to websites. By going beyond mere textual cues and actually analyzing composition and similarities between images to determine the most authoritative results for a particular search query, VisualRank promises to make Google's image search as good as its regular search counterpart.
Stock Screener for Google Finance
Google Finance has released a stock screener that lets users search for companies that meet custom and editable criteria, such as market cap and dividend yields. From the looks of it, the service appears to be rather useful, however, it is only available for companies traded at NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Which, obviously, is unfortunate if you're into stocks outside of those exchanges.
Speaker Notes and YouTube videos for Google Presentations
Google Docs continues to slap on the features, this time presenting us with the ability to add speaker notes as well as YouTube videos to our Google presentations. So the next time you really want to make an impact with your audience, you can have all your talking points right there in your presentation ready to print out or pop out in its own window, all while you're playing viral videos to break the ice. Nice.
