Unless you’re just off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you’re already aware of the product that made Google famous: its Search box. It’s become the card catalog for the Internet (and a whopping moneymaker for Google).
But any time you cram about 20,000 of the world’s smartest people into one company, you can expect to grow a garden of unrelated ideas. Especially when you give some of those geniuses one day off a week — Google’s famous “20 percent time” — to work on whatever projects fan their passions. And especially when you create Google Labs (labs.google.com), a Web site where the public can kick the tires on half-baked Google creations. Some Labs projects go on to become real Google services, and others are quietly snuffed out.
Such innovations — and a number of smart acquisitions — have led to hits like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar and others.
But the company has also cultivated a vast jungle of lesser-known features. Unfortunately, it’s so vast and varied, you would need a professional tour guide to help you find the gems.
Hello, my name is David. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.
iGoogle. Google.com became famous for its white, minimalist look. It loaded quickly in the days when dial-up modems ruled the earth.
Today, at iGoogle (www.google.com/ig), you can dress up all that white space with useful mini-boxes containing additional info. Hundreds of useful displays are available: a clock, local weather, movie listings, incoming e-mail, news, daily horoscope, to-do list, Twitter updates and whatever-of-the-day (joke, vocabulary word, quotation, Bible verse, photo and so on).
The best part: this stuff doesn’t slow you down. You can type in and execute a quick Google search before all those widgets have appeared.
Google Reader. Why spend your time finding and navigating to…