Google, It's Not Your Father's Search Engine

Is it wrong to love a search engine? If the search engine is Google, I think it's OK. Google is always there for me: If I cannot spell a word, Google gives me the correct spelling; if I need know how much tuna I can eat before I risk mercury poisoning, Google has the answer; if I want to find an image or video on any subject: I just need to reach out to Google Images and Video. And, with Google maps installed on my BlackBerry, I will never need to ask for directions, again (although, as a guy, and I never actually ask for directions, but now I have logical reason).

Google is positioning itself to be the portal for everyone. Once you've created your free Google account, you can customize your home page to show the news, sports, technology, or reference material you want. My home page includes a tab that shows a snapshot of my Gmail account, my Google calender, neighborhood gasoline prices, local news from 11Alive.com, the weather, and the headlines from the Atlanta Business Journal. And that's just one tab; I have five others. My personal news portal also includes a search which returns any articles that have the words 'real estate investing' in them.

Here are some of my favorite Mother Google tools.

Gmail. I've migrated most of mail to gmail (tony.sarrecchia@gmail.com); over 2.8 gigabytes of free email space. Google represents their mail client as 'never needing to delete email again', and that's one way to use it. Another way is to use it as almost 3 gig of off-site storage. With the recent opening of Gmail to everyone, you could set up multiple accounts just as a back-up to local storage.

Google Calender. Almost as powerful as Outlook, and much more flexible than ICalender; Google Calender offers a central spot to combine all calenders in one spot. Your calender can keep track of your appointments and send reminders to your cell phone or other mobile device. If you want to promote events you can share your calender (the Big Shanty festival shares their calendar). You can also import from Outlook, ICalender, or other appointment tracking tools.