Google – everywhere you want to be?

Google, the massive search engine that’s become a household name, continues to expand its services.  Google currently claims to be able to search over 4.25 billion web pages.  If you are one of the rare ones that are online but have never visited Google, click the link to see the main search page.

But Google can do a lot more than just search web pages.  It also claims to search 880 million images (mostly copyrighted images, however).  If you’re looking for news, you can search over 4500 news sources, and read localized news (such as this Canadian version).  You can get Google to alert you when new stories come down the line, using news alerts.  Looking for hard to find Christmas gifts?  Yes, you can shop with Froogle.  And that’s only a few of the things that Google can do.

But it’s the new Google stuff that I wanted to write about.  First of all, Google recently announced that it will allow you to actually search within the text of books.  This plan will be carefully arranged so that you won’t simply be able to download an entire book.  What you will be able to do is find out which books contain the type of info you’re looking for, and you’ll be able to buy the books online.  Yep, more income for Google.  This plan is perhaps a way to compete with amazon.com, which recently rolled out a search engine poised to become a competitor – A9.com.  Of course, amazon has allowed you to search within the book for some time now. Google has this info about their new search. You just use the normal Google search to access it, but I haven’t yet been able to see book results – leave us a comment if you see it work.

But perhaps the most revolutionary thing that Google has come up with recently is what it calls Google Local.  That link takes you to the Canadian version.  What you do is type in your town, or better yet, postal code, and then search.  For example, I’ll type in the place I’m staying in Sudbury, and then type in “oil change”.  Bingo!  A list of places where I can get my oil changed nearby, and a map of how to get there.  I can narrow it down to places within 10km or 2km, and I see that there’s a place only 1.8km away – there’s the address and phone number.

So the rush begins for local businesses to make sure that they’re online (Check out this article).  And as they go online, the old yellow pages become more and more inconvenient.  Since we’re travelling, this is a helpful service.  I just checked out something this morning, actually.  Yes, it’s far from perfect – like any search you get results that aren’t that helpful.  But give it a try, you may find it useful.  It really is going to change the way people use the internet.  And like or hate Google, no doubt other search engines will be doing the same thing as soon as possible.

Here are some sites, mostly not put out by Google but still interesting:

Google fight (humour)
Soople – easy one page Google interface
Googlebar for Mozilla Google search bar for Mozilla users
FaganFinder Google interface – advanced search interface
Google search trends – from Google itself