More than a plain old search engine...

During my free time today, I dropped by the computer labs. With nothing much to do, I decided to start up Internet Explorer and started poking around Google's website.

After much clicking, I discovered Google Labs; this is some place you can call Google's playground where visitors get to explore and play with some of Google's "under development" products.

Below are some of the few notable services...

• Google Web Accelerator
  It's pretty much a plugin which you can download into your computer, have it installed and whenever you start surfing the net, I suppose it pre-caches the content of the links within the page you are currently viewing. One interesting feature to note is the "time saved" counter which is built into the toolbar
  
  
• Google Ride Finder
  This service literally maps the exact locations of taxi's around parts of America in real-time! Just imagine, you've got this map in-front of you with various "dots" representing taxis. If you need to know the taxi's exact location, clicking zoom will bring you all the way down to street level! Cool! Unfortunately, the service is no use to Malaysians :(
  
  
• Google Compute
  Works a little like the SETI service where you download a tool and participate by giving some of your computer's precious idle time for processing data which would assist in Protein research and various projects supported by Google.
  
  
• Google Suggest (My personal favourite)
  Once you logon, it looks just like the Google search engine. The beauty is when you begin typing keywords for your search. Just imagine typing "Monash" and outcomes various combination of keywords in a little "auto-complete" drop down box such as "Monash University", "Monash University Australia", "Monash University Malaysia" and so on... this is a MUST TRY!
  
  
• and load, loads more such as personalized web search, google scholar for looking up journals - useful for assignments, video search... and the list goes on...
  

So give it a shot and logon to Google Labs! It's loads of fun - in my opinion of course :)

More later...