See what's on the slab...

...Down in Google labs.

A whole lot of, shiny crap. Really. Mars maps? ...Why?
All the really useful things have made it out of the labs already, although most of the city specific widgets lack my city. The few things that actually look interesting take more bandwidth than I've got at the moment. Google accelerator, for example.
"Optimized for Cable and DSL" Of which I have neither.

On the other hand, some of the tools might be handy. If very, very specialized. The computer code search, the accessible search for the visually impaired. That one could actually be useful at the library, if it could be implemented on an institutional level.

I did play with Google trends, and sets.

Frankly, I didn't see the point. Why would I care about what people are looking for? I'm not in advertising, or the news. (not that celebrities making fools of themselves is news, but it sure was popular today) And really, what is the point of the sets? It's like the tag clouds from flickr, or clustering, only crappy. The search I tried didn't work in the small set, and was full of completely irrelevant terms in the large set. I don't see any of these making their way onto the main site anytime soon.

Again, just another example of my fuddy-duddyness. Now in my day computers were hand-cranked! and built from scraps...!