Google isn’t that bad if you consider the rate at which they’re providing services to the region, I have my doubts at times, but today isn’t one that with the launch of Google Alerts (تنبيهات) in Arabic and Google Places (اماكن) for KSA.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
Some might refer to it as a custom mailing list of your choice, say you like World Cup news (sigh) well with Google Alerts you can have the most important items identified by Google on that topic delivered to your mailbox daily.
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The other interesting service is Google Places (اماكن) for Kingdom Saudi Arabia which Google launched for the rest of the world back in 2009 which some considered a move to compete with Yelp the online top destination for finding information on restaurants and businesses.
This service will eventually add an extra layer of information for businesses in the Middle East that allows them to describe such details like working hours, pricing and detailed nature of the business for Google Maps users to access when searching for a certain related keyword.
The service gets its information from multiple sources including direct user reviews to allow Google Places users to get a good understanding and informed choice when looking for a restaurant to eat from or company to do business with.
We hope Google will keep up the pace and start to actually include the region in their initial launches of the service rather have us wait for 6-9 months after the rest of world. So much for real time web ha?
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