Google AJAX is an interface for Google search that allows you to get the search results AJAX-style. This can be really handy when doing a series of quick searches. Better yet, however, is the widget that comes with it. Simply cut-and-paste the given code into your blog sidebar and you have inline Google search power — the results are displayed right in your sidebar! You can also (optionally) specify a URL to restrict the search to, thus creating a widget to do an AJAX-style search on your own site using the power of Google right from your sidebar! You can see an example of this in my own sidebar. The script is built using the power of YubNub.

No, it’s not a new service provided by Google — it’s a Ning app built on the Google Search API. The functionality is simple. You feed Google Related Pages a URL, and it gives you back a list of related webpages. The data is collected using Google’s ‘related:’ operator. I have found in tests that it gets pretty good results when used on popular pages, but not as well when used on less popular ones.

So what is the point? Why use this instead of just doing a ‘related:’ search on Google? Isn’t this just a nicer interface to something we could already do? Not quite. You see the app also generates RSS 2.0 and JSON(P) feeds of the results. Ultimately that is the point. Results can be integrated into pages, such as blog sidebars, or watched in feedreaders. Because the data is all in the Ning app, other formats will be easy enough to add if people want them.

Google is launching inline chatting for Gmail in the near future. There is already an option in your Gmail settings (or at least in mine, it seems to be coming online account-by-account) to save all your Google Talk chat logs into a section of your Gmail account called ‘chats’, to be searchable just like your email. There is also an information page stating that they plan to include the ability to chat directly from your Gmail screen (a la Meebo and others). This should prove interesting.

Google Talk has been opened to communicate with other XMPP IM services! One of the complaints against it when it first launched was that it used the open XMPP protocol, but was a closed system. No longer. This is a smart, and a useful, move for them. Hopefully they’ll add MSN/AIM/ICQ integration eventaully as well…

Google Base launched today. It seems to be a service that will host just about any content, from recepies to schedules to opensource projects. All items can be tagged and an arbitrary number of arbitrary fields with arbitrary datatype are available. This seems to be a service that aims at providing tools, not purpose, and you can do just about anything with it! An interesting idea, it’ll be interesting to see where it leads.

Official Announcement
Google Blogscoped Article

Tags: Google Google Base Websites