Google
Our cool website pick is "Google" - one of the most versatile and useful resources on the web.
Google is an extremely versatile search engine, designed to find appropriate information on the World Wide Web. What makes Google so special is its unique and proprietary algorithms which have an extremely high success rate finding just what you want.
For example, let’s say you’re searching for a car with high gas mileage. Just type in "40 MPG" or "high gas mileage car" into Google’s search engine and hundreds of webpages will be shown. Any decent search engine will do that, but Google does a better job than any other search engine we’ve seen when it comes to ranking the pages in order so the most useful candidates for what you want are on top. Google even helps correct minor typos if you’ve misspelled a word.
On many mailing lists the mantra "Google is your friend" is constantly repeated when somebody asks for a piece of information they could have easily looked up through Google.
You can even google yourself. Type your name into Google’s search engine and you be amazed what comes up. If you own property, have appeared in a news story, published a technical paper, or otherwise ‘existed’ in the real world you may find a webpage with that information. Of course you’ll also find many listings of unrelated people who happen to share your name too.
Google has even reached popular culture. In the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode "Help" the character Willow asks, "Have you googled her?" and Xander replies in shock, "Willow! She’s seventeen!" Naturally Willow has to explain, "It’s a search engine." and they end up finding the character’s webpage through Google.
But while Google’s most famous for its search engine it also has many other excellent resources.
It has an excellent map database showing streets, traffic conditions, and satellite views. Ever wondered what your house looks like from the point-of-view of a satellite hundreds of miles up? Just type in your street address into Google maps, zoom all the way in and select satellite view.
A somewhat geekier feature is the Usenet archives. Google calls it "Groups" but it’s one of the original features of the Internet. Usenet is a bulletin board where anybody can post messages on any topic of interest. There’s thousands of subgroups from sci.biology (discussions about biology) to rec.amateur.radio (amateur radio operators). Usenet predates Google but they’ve purchase a set of archives. When you display messages through Google it has a Google copyright but the actual copyright is still owned by the original author. Unfortunately there’s a lot of spam, off topic messages, and heated discussions but there’s also some excellent information.
Other Google features include image searches, videos, finding items to purchase from many online stores, and the capability of searching the text within hundreds of thousands of books.
Google is one of our favorite resources and it’s a rare day we don’t use it.
© 2008 neatinformation.com
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