Google Enriching My Life

Without me noticing, my Internet life now revolves around Google. I just like everything about Google. If Google has a branch in Malaysia, and they are looking for software engineer, I surely apply one. Hehehe. Google has so many fresh and new ideas on how they can revolutionize the world of internet, and they also seem to be a pioneer in quite a few of new technologies.

Those days, Yahoo was the very first search engine that I have come across. Search engine is one of the goddest in internet world. Without it, searching internet is impossible, and you have to rely on the published URLs list. Then came Astalavista and Hotbot and few others. But when Google came into the rivalry, I use no other than Google for my search engine.

Why Google search engine beats the others? Well. If you every use Yahoo before during those days, at the still very early age of internet, the result from Yahoo search engine really rely on their directory. Meaning people will register their website on Yahoo directory, and those URLs will be available for others to search.

What does this mean? Meaning if I have a website, and I don’t submit it to Yahoo directory, then my website will not be searchable by others.

So, when Google came it, it has this thing what we called “crawler robot”. This crawler, like the same said, will crawl the internet, visiting one webpage after another while digesting the content of the website for keywords, and that will be used for the search engine.

Again, what does this mean? It means that, I don’t have to worry about registering or submitting my website info to any search engine directory. I just wait for the crawler to visit my website, and eventually, my website will be available in the search engine. So, those days, by doing a search at Google, I get more search results. That was why I moved to Google as my favourite search engine that time.

Picasa has been around for a period of time already, and that time, you have to buy to use its full features. Since the booming of digital camera, and since I acquired one, I have plenty of digital photos that I take, and somehow, I need a way of organizing it. I tried a few other photo organizer software, but Picasa wins my heart due to its simplicity, resembling iPhoto a bit and it’s fast.

Not long after that, Google acquired Picasa, and now you can get it for free. Yay! Hail to Goole. I use Picasa extensively to manage my 8GB worth of digital photos.

Have you come across a scenario that you write something in Microsoft Word, but you forgot where you save it. Then you use Window’s built in “Search” to look for the file, you set it to search for the *.doc file in the entire harddisk. And have you ever experience how long it takes to search the whole harddisk?

In the past also, I tried to enable Indexing Services in Windows so that the search is faster in the event like this, but it is just using too much resources and slows down my computer.

And again, the super wooper Google has a solution for this by introducing Google Desktop Search. The indexing service runs in the background, and it only indexes your computer when it is idle. What does this mean? It will not interfere when you are using the CPU resources, therefore you won’t experience a slowdown.

And what’s the verdict like for the search speed? It is amazing fast. You can imagine Windows built is like a grandma with a stoller walking in the park, and Google Desktop Engine is like bullet train travelling at the speed of 186 miles an hour.

The lastest version of Google Desktop Search has the above sidebar. It is so useful and I really use it.

And what more that Google Desktop Search benefits me? At work, my Outlook inbox has approx 10,000 emails, ranging from the emails that I recieved and emails that I sent. And my boss always send me email like this :

Imran. Do you remember the hole count report that you prepared for XYZ survey last year? Can you resend it to me?

Also, most of the times when any issues arise for any of the project, I always refer back to the email chains that go back and forward between me, internal department and client. And have you tried using Outlook’s built in search? We are not talking about grandma with stroller speed here, but we are talking about the speed of tortise to get from point A to point B.

And how Google Desktop Search helps me with this? Well, I just type in the keyword that I want to search, and walla, in several seconds, all the emails containing the keyword will be displayed. I’m lovin’ it!!!

Long ago, KeyHole has this software that you can browse the globe interactively. I did get a 30 day trial account. And I was fascinated by how we can zoom the map from the outer space until we can see the roof of the building.

With Google acquiring this product, and rebrand it as Google Earth, it is now free.

It is something that I use everything, but it is fun to use during your free time. And don’t you know that Kuala Lumpur has already have high detailed map in Google Earth?

I am one of the early user of Hotmail, signing up not long after it is launched. That explains why I can secure mohd_imran [at] hotmail.com for myself (heheheh). It used to be so cool, but nowadays, what 2MB can do for you? I received a lot of junks email at that address and my 2MB storage always get full easily.

Gmail is just a revolutionary email service from Google. When it first out, the only thing that came to my mind is, Google has done it again!!! Instead of 2MB email storage, how about 1GB of space (storage offer when its first launched). And the space keeps incresing. At the time of writing, Google offers 2695.521774 megabytes of space.

I just don’t know how can they offer such a space, and I’m curious how big is their harddisk. It must be a pool of harddisks linked together (or maybe they are using some other storage media. Someone, please enlightened me).

And now we come to the lastest Google product that change the way how I express myself online – Blogger.

The term “weblog” was coined on 17th December 1997 (referring to “web log”). Then in April or May 1999 the term “weblog” is broken into to phrases, “we blog”. That was when the word BLOG became famous.

Xanga was the first blog service out there, followed by Blogger, which was purchased by Google in February 2003. So when it is purchased by Google, you can expect so many wonderful things about it. And yes. It is true. Blogger is fast, and offer a massive space for you to upload photos.

With Blogger acquired by Google, and with so many storage for storing photo, Picasa has come out with Hello, a chat software mainly to share photos with friend, but it also has Bloggerbot where you can upload photos easily to your Blogger account.

But I seldom use this now after I get myself Flickr account, and this is from Yahoo, one of Google’s direct competitor. And I wish Google will provide this kind of online photo storage service one day.

And there is also Google Maps. I don’t use this directly in my daily life, but with the comprehensize API that it has, there’s this product called gVisit that display the visitor to your blog/website graphically on Google Maps.

I really wish Google will purchase this gVisit one day.