With the recent addition of satellite photos to Google maps, there has been a lot of talk about this search engine. Some people suddenly fear for their privacy, even though these images have been available through Terraserver for awhile now (in fact, the image of my house in Whittier is zoomed in A LOT more on Terraserver than on Google Maps).

Anyway, this leads me to the point of my post—I think that all the stuff Google has added is really cool! I’m lazy, so anything that saves me from having to go to 10 sites or clicking on multiple links to get the info is great in my opinion.

Google is my homepage at work, so it’s easy to use the new features. Now, instead of mapquest, I just type an address directly into Google and get a map and driving directions. Instead of going to IMDB and looking up a movie time, I just type the name of the movie and up pops the local showtimes. Instead of pulling up the calculator in Windows, I type in the numbers into the search box and get results. And now, instead of going to Yahoo Finance or logging into my 401k account, I can see how my stocks are doing by typing in the stock symbol, you guessed it, directly in the Google search box. You can also get the weather, bypassing weather.com. The local feature is pretty handy too.

Maybe it’s a bad thing that they are starting to take over realms formerly dominated by other companies who specialized in such things. But Google’s features work well and easily. Of course, I don’t always remember that they are there, but I think they are neat!

I don’t even have stock in them and I feel semi-evangelical. Does anyone else use the new features and find them as nifty as I do??

Posted at 10:11 AM |