Hot wired: Seek and you shall find

By PAUL BRISLEN

Google is cool. It's so cool, it's red hot. It has floated on the stock exchange, it's scaring Microsoft. It's giving customers funky new tools we didn't know we didn't have. Best of all it's free. All of it. That's right, the dotcom bubble is alive and well and still unable to explain how they make money.

Google, for those who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, is a search engine. Long gone are the days where you could enter a search term in Alta Vista, or wherever, and come up with 1.8 million possible answers, none of which matched what you were after.

Google has swept them all aside with mighty technology that delivers answers based on how many other websites think that's the right answer. So a search for "All Blacks" is more likely to point you at the official All Blacks website than one with the words All and Black in the title.

But wait, there's more.

Google's not happy sitting around with its thumb in its ear. The boffins at Google HQ, and let's face it, they're all boffins, are churning out new applications and tools that make life easier. Google's going to take over the world so we should just all get used to it. I, for one, welcome our new search engine overlords.

GMAIL WITHOUT SPAM

If you haven't been invited to sign up for Gmail yet, you need to get out more. This is Google's answer to Hotmail - without the spam. Gmail is a free service that lets you chose an email address that's yours to keep and then gives you a gigabyte of free storage. That's right, 1 GB. For those that aren't in the know, that's a tremendous amount. Looking in my inbox, at the moment, most emails I have are around 10 KB (kilobytes), meaning I could store 100 of them for every megabyte (MB). There are 1000 MB to every GB so that means I could save every email I have sent and received for a considerable amount of time, and it's all free. But that's not the coolest bit. The coolest part is that the entire Gmail file is fully text searchable so you can scrounge around looking for comments you made years ago to that weird guy that emailed you that time.

Price: Free

GOOGLE NEWS

Leaving human editors out of the loop entirely is a personal favourite dream of mine. Google's news service does just that, apparently, by using its software to search various news services (including the nzherald.co.nz) and put the news stories into categories. Best of all, it puts the stories that are most popular at the top of each category and updates the whole thing minute by minute.

Set the site to show you New Zealand-centric news or have a look at what the rest of the world is getting. A vital source for news hounds everywhere. Just keep buying the Herald though, OK?

Price: Gratis

GOOGLE PRINT

The best thing about Google Print is you already have it. Simply go to Google and type in "books about obscure telecommunications regulation" and it will spew out links to the books. That's right, not to websites with the word book on them but to the online version of those books if they exist.

There are plenty of online books available already - the Gutenberg Project is putting up every non-copyright work it can get its hands on - and this should ensure more are added at a speedy rate. Great for bookworms everywhere.

Price: Nada

Let's not forget the other Google Labs toys - there's Froogle, for shopping searches; Google Groups, for online news groups; Google SMS that lets you ask questions via text message, and a few more besides. Check out labs.google.com for more.