Google has made the news quite a bit recently with some of their new product offerings, so I decided to play around with the latest services to pop up.
Google Analytics – This service offers free website statistics collection for webmasters. The screenshots and testimonials I have read about the service (which Google bought several months ago) was very promising, however it seems that the demand has been so high that their servers are a bit overburdened. In regular operations, statistics and reports are to update themselves in such a way that the data is never more than six hours old. However, I’ve had my account for more than 24 hours and there is still no data available. From newsgroups I’ve read, this seems entirely normal these days and is expected to improve over time. I trust that they will continue to improve their capacity and deliver an awesome service much like they have with Google Mail and Google Talk.
Google Base – This new classifieds service, somewhat like Craigslist, was leaked a few weeks ago and I had a chance to play with it then. Yesterday I posted a job listing for a new opening at my company but I haven’t received any responses yet. Searching for jobs is a bit cluttered because it seems a few large websites have flooded their listings on the site via the bulk upload feature. Poo on them, but I may try it again in the future to see if it improves.
You may have also noticed that my websites are now sporting Google ads. I have enough visitors, and some of my websites come up at the top of search listings for common terms, that I figured I could make a little money from it all. I definitely think it’s a neat way to support some of the costs of maintaining my website and fund some new projects I’d like to roll out.
So the conclusion is that Google’s new stuff carries a lot of hype and has generated a lot of interest, but it seems they have their capacity for supporting all of those initial visitors has been a little light. First impressions count for a lot, but they are free enough that I’ll probably give them a second shot a few weeks down the road. It will also be interesting to see what Microsoft comes out with in the next few months, I’ll be on the lookout!