Internet Tools - week 7

Sooo.... Internet Tools, what are they ? Some examples of internet tools would be search engines like Google and Yahoo, and those tools you can find in google.

I used to be a Yahoo! User... until Google came along. Of cos i didn't switch over immediately, when Google first came out, i didn't like it, because i thought that there

wasn't much functions as the

User Interface was too plain, but boy can i be so wrong. Anyway, it always take me quite a while to like and get accustomed to new interfaces, so like i said, i think i didn't switch over to Google until it was perhaps at least 2 or 3 years old. And when i did, i realised how much i've missed out.

Today, like many people would have said, google is my new found best friend. Almost literally. One of the first Google tool i've used was it's email. If i didn't remember wrongly or at least to my knowledge, Google's Gmail was the first email services to offer 1 GB of mail storage space. At tha

t time, that kind of storage was enormous! Hotmail, the hottest online emailing tool then offered much lesser, probably about 500mb or less. People who send out and receive attachments welcomed and were very thankful to Google, because this means they could h

ave stored more stuff than ever before. And so once again, i bade farewell to hotmail. Hello Gmail! But of course, in the competitive world of the internet, the others followed suit. And so now we all have large storage for our emails.

It was not until i've tried their email tool did i switch over to its search engine. Nowadays, anything that i don't know, or need assistance in, i simply over the browser and google it. Oh by the way, google's set as my homepage. That probably already says a lot. As Yahoo! main cust

omers or consumers are its advertisers, the first few results that it returns when you search for something are usually those paid by their advertisers, meaning you may not find what you are looking for exactly or in other words, it may take you longer time to get to what you are really looking for.As for Google, their focus and consumers are on its users, so the results that they try to return can be generally more related to a user's searches and thus, save more time. That is one of the very important reasons why i decided to switch over from Yahoo! Google is my best friend because anything that i need to know or things that i need to find, it has them ready for me, almost everytime. It never fails me.

And then it jus got bigger. There were google Maps. Goo

gle Translate. Google Scholar. Google News. Google Docs. To

day, I NEED to live with all these tools. Without them, believe it or not, i feel so lost. Today, Google Maps have been incorporated into mobiles/cell phones, i cannot say how brilliant this can be, especially for a direction idiot like me. Everytime i need to go to somewhere new, i just need to turn on the Google Map app found in the iPhone and it leads me to it. I no longer know what getting lost or walking round in circles means anymore! This is really a savior for mankind, i may exaggerate, but i'm not kidding. Even before the app was on iPhone, we could still log onto Google map and type in the directions and it would still give us step by step directions to get to our intended destinations! And the last i heard, there are now even webcams on GoogleMap to assist you in monitoring situations such as traffic and perhaps even the weather. How sweet.

And if you're w

orried that you stumbled upon some website in foreign languages, fear not. Google is again, here to the rescue. With that tool, it will give one a basic or general translation of a word you've entered. It may not always be accurate though, as we know that there are some puns in our languages, but it works pretty well for me. Sometimes, i have friends who want to act mysterious on facebook, and they will type in other languages like french, japanese or korean in their status updates. With Google Translate, it's SO easy to "decipher" what they are saying. HAHA. Gotcha! Oh, and if you are using Google's Chrome, Google's web browser, if you stumble upon a website that is of foreign language, it even offers or prompt you to let them translate the entire website for you!

The last thing that is really worth mentioning will definitely be Google Scholar. I never knew of such tool until i went into college. With research paper due every month or so, this tool is ESSENTIAL to all college students. It helps you to collate and find reliable sources or scholarly journals which you can use to reference for your research papers. And if you have access to your college's e-library, that's even better because Google Scholar can also link it to that and generate even more results for you.
Really! Talk about convenience, Google has it all. Thank you Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page! What would we have done without you!