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Nah, I’m just kidding, it’s not really a secret. The tools just aren’t “publicly” released yet…they’re still in Google’s Lab, in other words they are still in beta testing to make sure that they work properly.

I’ve been using a couple of them for more than two years now! You would think that they’d be public by now, but apparently not. These tools are useful for many things, but probably most importantly keyword research as well as just finding new things! Isn’t that what’s the Internet’s all about?

First of all, I’ll show you a new search engine idea that they have running. The new search engine improvement shows timelines with your search term(s). You can see an example of it in action with the term nanotechnology. I actually figured out a way that you can do any search you want with the “timeline” in effect. Go to Google.com and in the search box type in your search terms and at the end, add a space, then type: view:timeline. It’ll show you the timeline of most things, it’s a very cool research tool.

Next up is Google Transit. Now, at the moment this probably isn’t useful for most people since it’s currently only for parts of the United States and Japan, but you can see the potential a tool like this can have. When I was living in Japan there was a site like this and I used it every week to figure out the best times to take the trains and buses (and subways). It will also tell you how far something is to walk and how to connect them all. That’s the most important part, because honestly, who wants to do all of the work of computing a route before you even get going?

The next two are great keyword research tools. Google Suggest is a really interesting tool to find new things. Type in a single word of something that you’re interested in and it’ll suggest a ton more options. It’s all in real-time too so you could even just type in a couple of letters to see it start working. Another really good keyword research tool is Google Trends. I’ve seen a lot of people just discovering this tool, but it’s been out for almost a couple years now. So go catch-up on some research! It’s a really interesting tool to compare the Internet traffic of two or more separate keywords. For example, say you wanted to search to see how Microsoft has ranked against Apple and Linux. Just type in “Microsoft, Apple, Linux” and you’ll get this. A cool thing about Google Trends is that it will also show you what parts of the world are searching for these terms and in what languages.

Last on our list is Google Sets. This tool is great in general, or maybe just for people like me who have a failing memory j/k. Basically it will predict the rest of the items in a set for you. The set could be of anything you can think of. Just enter about 3-5 items from the set and it can predict either a “small” set (15 or less items) or a “large” set (more than 15 items). A couple sets of items I just thought of and tested were “sofa, table, chair” which produced this list. And, “Binion’s, Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay, Flamingo Hilton” (all hotels in Las Vegas) and it produced this list for me.

Well that’s it! Hope you enjoy those tools. You can learn quite a lot from them and they might actually save you a ton of time. Let me know what you think!

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