Integration seems to be today's theme.  Integrated marketing… integrated products… and now integrated search.  The Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog announced the availability of several new features for their products that, among other things, integrates Google search data into spreadsheets.

GoogleLookup and GoogleFinance are two new functions that call data from Google search and display the results in your spreadsheet.  For example, entering =GoogleLookup("USA","population") returns "298,444,215 (July 2006 est.)".  Furthermore, =GoogleLookup("APPL") returns "61.19".  The syntax of the new functions is pretty straightforward.  GoogleLookup uses a "object","attribute" synation, like "California","capital".  GoogleFinance is even simpler.  Simply use the ticker symbol of the stock you want to look up and your spreadsheet will magically contain its stock price.  What's more… it updates.  Yes… that's right.  As the stock price changes, so does the number in your spreadsheet.

The Google blog post said the new features were addicting, and they were right.  Instead of finishing this article I've been playing with a spreadsheet.  Some of the things I tried didn't work.  For example, I used "sears tower","height" and… nothing.  I figured that would be easily translated and found.  But alas, it was not.  I'm willing to bet Google will continue to tweak these new functions.  The possibilities of what could be created with them are awesome.

Google also added the ability to revert to previous revisions of a document or spreadsheet.  This will help prevent unintentional changes from becoming permanent or accidental data loss.

If you haven't tried Google Docs & Spreadsheets yet this is a great reason to.  If nothing else, playing with the new Lookup and Finance functions is mad fun!