Gay for Google
I’m a consumer whore, and Google is my crack cocaine. In the online battle for hearts and minds, I’m backing Google.
Google is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to everyone it’s at least a search engine. When I first heard of the Google search engine around 1998 or 99, most people were used to Yahoo. It was ok to find some stuff. Looking back, it wasn’t exactly kick ass… but it was the best search engine because there wasn’t much out there.
When I first used google.com to search and found a hundred thousand hits, I was skeptical. Is there even 100K web pages on the whole internet? How could it possibly return this many results in under 1 second? I did some search, checked the first 20 and some other random 10 or so links and found that it was indeed very accurate. I concluded it was some form of voodoo magic going on in the Google server. It became my favourite search engine and has gone on to become the default search engine for the whole online community. It’s now a verb. Yes, I have googled myself, and found that someone with my name is an “abuser of women and must be stopped”. Interesting.
But Google has so much more going on that their search engine. The first service I really remember taking notice of was Google Earth. Beautiful high resolution orbital and aerial images covering the whole Earth, with a simple and intuitive interface and API. And they were offering it for free! How could this be?
Google Earth gave rise to Google Maps, which later went on to include Streetview. Trust me, this is a gigantic project and to even contemplate it has sent great minds insane. But there it is… decent resolution, accurately geolocated images of sreets, houses and landmarks. And free to use for whoever wants it.
I’ve been using GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other apps for a while now, and they are central to how I organise and live my life. All email addressed to me by various means gets sent to Gmail. From there I can create appointments in Google Calendar. I scan and convert to PDF almost all my mail and store it in Google Docs so I can find it whenever and wherever I am. With my Windows Mobile-powered phone I can access all of this at any time. I do plan on upgrading to a Google-powered phone some time too.
I also make use of Picasa at home, to organise all my photos. More of the above mentioned voodoo magic is in the latest 3.6 version which includes facial tagging which I have found to be about 99% accurate. I don’t use the Picasa Web Albums so much, but the desktop application owns.
I use, pretty exclusively, the Google Chrome web browser. I find it uses a lot less RAM than MS Internet Explorer, and since my old desktop only had half a GB I needed every little bit. Chrome has some really helpful and useful Extensions to make life easier.
So, there you go. I reflected on how much I use and rely on Google this morning on the train, and I’ve touched on some of the services and products I use. There are some non-Google services I use: a deployment of Wordpress over Blogger for instance. Not that there’s anything wrong with Blogger, but Wordpress suits me better. Soon I’ll dump Skype and use Google Voice. I want Buzz and Wave to be a success, but I haven’t been able to find too many people in my immediate circle of online friends who’ve been converted yet. Maybe in time.
Meanwhile, I’ll be swimming in the money Google gives me for my Adwords and Adsense. Click on the advertising you find on my web page to help a brother out!
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