For the unaware, Google Labs is an online showcase of interesting prototypes that are currently being researched and developed by Google’s industry-leading engineers and researchers.
Over the years, it’s seen the creation of, what are now, some of Google’s biggest online products, such as Google Maps, Google Docs and more recently, Google Social Search (View all ‘Labs’ Almuni’s).
Interestingly, many of these well-known Google Products originally started life as Google offer their employees ’20-percent time’ to propose, develop and ultimately test launch new products for their company.
As a result, Google Labs is always bursting with new toys to play with, including a number which are very useful for website design and development purposes.
Google Code Search
http://www.google.com/codesearch
Learn how to correctly code language variables using Google Code Search
Google Code Search is essentially an online database of code samples from well-known development languages including HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript.
If you’re unsure on how to define a specific code variable or attribute, Google Code Search can show you correct examples from across the internet.
.sample1 {border-left: solid 1px #fff00;}
.sample2 {border-left: dotted 1.2em green;}
.sample3 {border-left: dashed 3.0in rgb(50,50,50);}
One theoretical scenario could be that, if you wish to a CSS variable, say, such as ‘border-left’, but you are unsure on how to structure it, searching for the term on Google Code Search will bring up numerous implementations of the variable to teach you how.
Google Related Links
http://relatedlinks.googlelabs.com/
Display to your Users other parts of your Website that may be of interest
Google Related Links is an easy-to-integrate widget which once implemented on any given page of a website, will automatically generate a set of links which are related to the specific page.
What’s really useful about this is that is can encourage visitors to browse further throughout a website, which naturally increases page views. Google also provide a similar widget built specifically for 404 pages, which my colleague James Kemp recently highlighted in his ‘Style the Google 404 Widget‘ blog post.
Google Browser Size
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
How does your Website appear across common display resolutions?
Google Browser Size is a quick tool that can help visualise to web designers which aspects of their website design cannot be viewed by a user without causing them to scroll across the page.
Based specifically on current screen resolutions statistics, although it’s a little rough around the edges, it ultimately provides information on how you can effectively tweak your website for maximised usability.
Further Reading
Google also have created experimental playgrounds for some of their other products, such as Google Chrome Experiments which we have highlighted in a recent video, and my blog post on YouTube Experiments.
