Are you feeling lucky?

Google has become such a powerful presence in the lives of mainstream Internet users that I truly believe that anyone who has to rely on the Web for his or her daily dose of information fill-up should and would (by now) know where to find it. For those in the dark of this Web Search wunderkind, I would like to briefly introduce you to the family of Google tools that empowers mere workstation drones with fresh resources unknownst to them before...

Web Search - as everyone SHOULD know, it is the Internet's most darling search engine, often giving the most relevant results (although smart-alecky advertisers have learned how to pollute searches using trickery) compared to other lesser search engines. Plus, it's not JUST a plain vanilla search engine... Google comes with various features that you can use in your daily grind, such as units conversion (try "65 mph to kph", or "32 F to C").

Groups - dig through the many USENet newsgroups and mailing lists to find answers to your most obscure and insipid questions! Actually, this is a gold-mine for IT tech support folk, like yours truly. I feel that if there is a problem that ever comes up (esp on Windows), more often than not, someone else would have gotten the same issue before!

Local - a.k.a. Google Maps, this driving directions and business mapping tool has combined the power of satellite imagery and road-mapping to give travelling users one of the most useful online "hybrid" tools ever! Many smart and creative folks have used the freely-available Google Maps API to create other interesting informative tools. And for those of you with the system horsepower and Windows 2000/XP (sorry Mac and Linux users), you might wanna give the free Google Earth a try! Find your home, wherever it is on the face of this planet (I found mine, in Singapore, using the satellite imagery... it's pretty amazing)!!

News - no longer do you have to open a dozen browser windows/tabs to find the latest news from around the world! With the information-harnessing capability of Google, all your favorite news outlets can be referenced from a single portal. (Of course, for all you RSS/newsfeed fans, you probably have your tickertapes already running on your desktop :)

Froogle - although still a relatively crude price grabbing tool, Froogle has come a long way since its inception and I've found myself using it more often, along with my other price-matching tools such as PriceGrabber and ResellerRatings.

SMS (US & UK only) - Ever wished to find the address to the nearest branch of your favorite restaurant? Or find a comparable market price of a particular item? Well, if you have a cell phone and reside in the US of A, search using Google SMS! Pretty handy to have around, esp if you decide NOT to tote your laptop around for shopping trips!

Some other tools that I've not used as much, but deserve some mention, such as the new (and controversial) Books Search, the online Images gallery, Scholarly libraries search (for links to books, journals and articles), and Directory - a categorized search engine (not unlike the Yahoo! and Open Directory style).

For those of you who enjoy to stay on the cutting edge of Google's development, try checking out their company Blog or their Labs once in a while... many interesting things pop-up there. I've seen quite a number of interesting tools show up, such as Google Video (excellent resource of funny and 'informative' videos, uses Flash to stream) and Google Base (a collaborative online database of stuff, putting a foot onto Craig's List and eBay turf).

More great stuff that Google provides are applications that can be installed onto your PC to help you bring information to your desktop. Unfortunately, most of these are Windows-centric (where's the love for Mac and Linux users?!). Anyway, some of the most important tools that I've seen from Google include:

Google Toolbar for IE - waaayyy before Redmond decided that their flagship browser DOES need a pop-up blocker and search bar, which (IMHO) is an ESSENTIAL feature of any modern browser, I've told every single IE user that they should HAVE this installed to ensure that they are free to annoying pop-up ads and have instant access to the Google search engine (of course, this advice usually follows my initial rant, "What the heck are you using IE for? Switch to Firefox and/or Opera NOW!!!" >;).

Picasa - An excellent (and FREE) photo/image/graphics catalog tool, anyone who has a ton of pictures in their machine will find this a god-send to keep their stuff organized, without burning a hole in their wallets! Try it today, coz you've got nothing to lose! :)

Gmail - ahhh... Google Mail. It's been, like, so long since we first saw free mailbox providers panic at the announcement of Google's intent to give their mailbox subscribers an entire Gigabyte (read: that's a sh*tload of space!) of e-mail storage goodness. Of course, it started out as an invitation only service, but word got around FAST and people flocked to the Gmail service, in every way possible! Today, Gmail is open to US consumers, and storage space has been bumped up to a whopping 2.5GB (!) so sign up if you haven't already! As for those of you residing in the rest of the World, send me a message if you need an invitation! ;)

There are some other interesting developments that I've not delved into as much, such as the language translator (similar to Yahoo!/Altavista's Babelfish), the Desktop/Deskbar tools, and the newly introduced IM (instant messaging) client Google Talk. Those of you would enjoy programming and would love to incorporate Google's tools and capabilities into your next big application, should check out Google's open source Code initiative.

*deep breath*

Ok, I guess you guys can tell I've become a slave to Google... :P