What are the hidden gems of Google?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Hi everybody. This is Matt Cutts and we’re talking about some of the hidden gems of Google, some products that you might not know about. So in the month of July, I’ve been trying to bike in to work. And one of the things I want to do, because I’m a software engineer and I’m a little competitive, is time myself and see how well I’m doing and how fast I can bike to work. So I played around. There was an iPhone application that I paid, like, three bucks for, which is pretty good, which will plot your GPS location. You’ll get a little path and you can see where you’ve been and you can sort of time yourself. And that’s a very nice application. But then, somebody told me about a very neat application for Android. It was written by a bunch of smart googlers and it’s completely free. What it does is you just say, I’m going to start recording the track and then you go around and you do whatever you’re going to do. And what ends up happening is it will show your track on the map. So what I can do is I can click around, I can Scroll all the normal sort of stuff. I can also do a few fun things. For example, in addition to this map, if I click to Scroll to one side of the other, it will show me how much I’ve been moving. So, it’ll tell me the total distance that I’ve gone, the maximum speed that I’ve gone, all sorts of great things, even elevation. And in fact, if I click again, I can see a graph of the elevation over time. And so, I can see, oh, you know what, it was mostly flat over this particular track. Now this particular phone belongs to our cameraman, Wysz. And we use the special ability to share with your friends. So if you click and say share with friends, then it’s really easy to send someone a link to that entire track on Google My Maps. So let’s look here. Now, Wysz has sent me this email. I would like to share a Map with you. And so, we click through to see what it looks like and you can see the track on Google Maps. So we have this ability to upload things onto Google Maps via a product called My Maps, or a feature called My Maps. And the neat thing is if you click on the end part, it will show you the total distance you’ve traveled, all the stats that you saw on the Android phone. So for example, one feature that the My Tracks application has that the iPhone application didn’t have is that you can–say, okay, the total time that I was biking was 42 minutes and 19 seconds, but the moving time was only 34 minutes. So about eight minutes was spent at stoplights. And the stoplight should not count against you while you’re biking in and out of work. So it’s just a fun little application. It works really, really well. It’s completely free. And so, if you’re running Android, just download it from the marketplace and you’re good to go.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: