Google At Ten

September 8, 2008 · Filed Under Geek Fun, mo30dc2008 

Yesterday was Google.com’s 10th birthday. I still remember the first time I ever went to google.com’s home page. The first thing I said was, “Where’s all the stuff?” By the time they came around, search engine sites like yahoo.com were already on their way to becoming portal sites with more content than you could shake a stick at. Google’s clean and simple page was such a welcome change, it didn’t take very long at all before it became my default search tool. (Heck, it wasn’t all that long before Google became a verb.) Now, 10 years later, even though I don’t necessarily use the search engine every day, I use at least 1 (if not several) Google products each and every day.

Google Properties I frequent:

Gmail - I’ve had a gmail account since it was tough to get an invite to sign up for one. While yahoo was making their interface 1000 times worse, Google kept things simple. I don’t need drag and drop features in my email. I’d much rather have the speed gmail maintains compared to the bloatedness of yahoo mail any day.

Maps - Back in the day I loved MapQuest. Then Google came out with Maps and it was a whole new ball game. When the street view feature came out I thought it was kinda silly. Then, one day while trying to provide somebody with a landmark to help them find a store, the brilliance of it all came crashing in. They gave me the tool I needed long before I realized I needed it. And now with the iPhone/GPS integration… game, set match.

YouTube - Online video = YouTube. Done and done. OK, fine, they didn’t make this one. They just bought it. But just watch what they do with it over the next 18 months. It’s going to be one of their biggest profit centers. Just a matter of time.

Reader - I had been using NetVibes as my RSS reader for quite a while. That is until I realized that I could use Google reader on my iPhone and read all my RSS feeds wherever I was at. This caused me to take a long look at it and I’ve now switched to using google reader as my default RSS desktop tool, too.

Chrome - It has supplanted FireFox yet as my default browser, but once the list off add-ons that I use in FF are available for Chrome, I’m heading over. The speed difference is noticeable. Plus, I love that the address bar and the google search box are one and the same. In 6 months time I expect it to be my default. We’ll see.

Search - The integrated google search in the FireFox browser is so handy. I love not having to go to google.com and THEN perform my search. The only thing that would be better would be the ability to just hit CTRL+G to have a dialog box pop up automatically so I wouldn’t even have to take my hand off the keyboard to do a search.

I was starting to feel a bit like a fanboy. Then I remembered, there are some sites that I use that are not owned/operated by Google even though there is a competing product made by the big G. For instance, Flickr.com. I tried out Picasa a while back, but it’s not always about the site itself. A lot of times it’s about the 3rd party apps that go along with it. Flickr’s set of apps is amazing. I have them on my iphone, my desktop, my blog, etc. For now I’ll stick with flickr.

Happy Birthday Google. Congratulations on 10 great years and a slew of great products. I’m expecting more big things from you over the next 10 years.

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