With Google News you can create a customized alert based on your search. To do this, you must be logged in to Google. Run your search. Near the bottom of the search results page click on the "Create alert" button. See the image below for a search on California Racial Politics.
In the next screen, you can manage your customization, including language, source country, and how many times you want to be emailed, or you can set up the notification as an RSS Feed.
Google's Ngram Viewer allows you to search the corpus of Google Books for word frequency. This can be helpful for determining trends in language, the origin of slang or common phrases, etc. You can also import the image for a paper or share via social media. Multiple words/phases can also be searched. Below is the Ngram for computer.
Google Trends allows you to track a topic's popularity based on how many times those terms were searched in Google. Google Trends can be searched as far back as 2004 and allows for seeing what terms are popular in various regions of the world or cities, see web searches vs news searches, etc. Below are examples of the trends for the "Arab Spring":
Google's Arts & Culture search will allow you to search museums, artists, art work, etc. Searches can also show you nearby exhibits with an artist (if you have your location enabled). Many of the images found are high-resolution, suitable for academic work when you cannot travel to the museum, and many come with some explanatory text. This tool is still in beta.
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