Thing 29 Part 1: Google Tools

Since I only started up the iGoogle experiment yesterday and I had more Things time today, I'm moving on to the next one and will post a thing 28 follow up later.

I'm having a lot of fun with the Google Labs section of the tools, where they let you try out a bunch of programs or tools that they're developing but haven't necessarily released for ful public consumption yet. Some of these have been around for a while, but might keep their place in the "Labs" section because they aren't as practical as the tools on the main page. For example, there's one called Google Trends which lets you look at which search terms have been the most popular over the past day or so. It's really cool to see how many searches have been done on something, and there's a little sidebar linking to relevant to news sites with relevant content explaining why something is suddenly popular -for example, one of the top searches was on "Ryan Adams", and when I clicked there were a bunch of links to his and Mandy Moore's announcement that they're engaged. I hadn't heard about this yet, but apparently a lot of people have. This could be a really useful tool to measure what MOST people think is noteworthy or what they want to know more about. I think Google is going to give a pretty accurate cross section of America's population.

Other than that, some of the other features I used were a bit dull. I experimented with SearchWiki, which lets you organize your google search results based on websites you like or dislike, and saves this information for when you search for the same term again. I couldn't really see any great use for this one. I don't know why I'd be searching for the same information over and over again, and if I find a website I like I'll more than likely just save it to my favorites. I guess if you have a computer you only use for specific jobs you could potentially use this to keep relevant stuff on top? But I'd rather just use del.icio.us or something if I really needed that.

I already have gmail, so I don't feel exactly right saying that's a new tool I tried, but I do like it and consider it easy to use, so it has that going for it.

My main goal this time, then, is going to be to continue to root around in the google tools until I find something I feel I can use in my everyday life.