Google to the max
By David Flynn | smh.com.au | 22 April
Everyone knows that if you want to search the web, Google is the place to go. And if you want a free web-based email account - either to get access from any PC or just to free yourself from the limits of your ISP's own email system - then Google's Gmail service is right up there with Hotmail and Yahoo.
But there's more, much more, to Google than just super-fast searching or even free email. The colossus of the dot-com world has scores of online services, all of them free but most of them undiscovered by those of us who rarely go beyond hitting the Search button on google.com.au. Here's our list of the best ways to get more from Google.
Sign up
All Google services are free but many require you to have a Google account. Happily, this is also free. If you've got a Gmail address then consider yourself already signed up. Otherwise, head to www.google.com.au/accounts to step through this quick and painless process. You can use your existing email address as your log-in or snaffle a Gmail account (which gives you a new @gmail.com address) while you're there.
Search among the scholars
Google's standard search reaches far and wide around the web and homes in on the most popular websites; Google Scholar, however, narrows its scope to literature such as peer-review journals, theses and articles from academic groups and professional societies. It's extremely popular with students and lawyers, as well as people working in the fields of science and health, although just about anyone with a deep interest in a specific area will give Google Scholar top marks.
For a Google Scholar search, click the Scholar link that sits atop the empty box where you'd usually enter the search term on the Google home page or just go directly to scholar.google.com.au. As with all Google services, there's a great help page to help you along.
You might also want to add Book Search (books.google.com.au) to your checklist. This is part of Google's exhaustive if somewhat controversial effort to scan entire books and place links, extracts or, in the case of copyright-free works, their entire text online.
Find your way
Google Maps is one of those "wow" programs. Show it to someone who uses Google a dozen times a day but has never seen this online mapping service and almost every time you'll get a jaw-dropping, open-mouthed response. Google Earth has "wow" times a hundred, of course, but Google Maps is far more practical.
Start your journey at maps.google.com.au and enter an address in the search box to get a detailed "street directory" view of the location. (You can also click the Satellite-view button to see the same location on Google Earth's eye-in-the-sky satellite photos, or combine the two using the Hybrid button.)
Where this is particularly useful is in route planning. Click the To Here or From Here links to have Google Maps plot a route to or from any other address, complete with a detailed set of driving directions that can be printed out to use in the car (and to keep back-seat drivers in their place).
Need to change your route to allow for visiting a friend or picking up something along the way? Just drag the purple route marker (after zooming out to a larger map view, if need be) to the desired location and Google Maps not only adjusts to your detour but recalculates the route (sometimes to a more efficient path) and issues new driving instructions.
As with all Google services, a little experimentation will uncover additional tricks such as saving maps for future use and finding nearby shops, restaurants or other points of interest.
Made to measure
Google is famous not only for its rapid searching but its sparse home page - but once you've got a Google account, you can create a customised Google start page with a wealth of information and tools at your fingertips. It makes little difference in how fast the page loads, although if you're still using dial-up we suggest you stick with a clean slate.
Click the iGoogle link at the top-right of the Google search page for a sampling of what's available or sign in with your Google account and really go to town with this roll-your-own start page. Click the Add Stuff link to browse the extensive catalogue of web gadgets.
Your iGoogle page can have additional search boxes to scour sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and eBay; currency and measurement converters; world time clocks, news and weather updates and much more. Each sits in its own frame that can be dragged around on the page; click the down arrow at the top-right corner of each frame to edit the gadget's settings.
To avoid cluttering up the main page, you can create separate tabs to hold different gadgets. Google's Election 2007 portal (www.google.com.au/election2007) includes a button that creates a new tab pre-loaded with news feeds, polling updates and YouTube channels for the coming Federal election.
Share your snaps
There are several free programs to help edit, organise and backup your digital photos, so why do we recommend you download Google's Picasa for Windows? It's because Picasa, which is incredibly easy to use yet surprisingly rich in features, lets you put your photographs into an online web album that can be shared with family and friends.
Instead of emailing dozens of photos to all and sundry, which can often clutter up inboxes, images in Picasa can be uploaded to your password-protected web album with a single click.
Each Picasa account gets 1GB of storage, which is enough for about 4000 photos. Visitors to the site can download images to keep on their PC (great for proud grandparents). You can download the software from picasa.google.com and get access your web albums through your Google account. If you've got a Mac, Google offers an iPhoto plug-in for directly uploading images to your web albums (it's at picasa.google.com/web/mac-tools.html).
Get some groupies
Google Groups (groups.google.com.au) are email-based mailing lists dedicated to a specific topic. This can be a professional or hobbyist interest, a community or sporting association or even a short-term effort such as a lobby group for some local project.
In fact, groups are good for pretty much anything you'd want to chat to someone else about. There are tens of thousands of groups in existence but the real strength of Google Groups is that you can easily create your own group on almost any subject.
Your emails are sent to everyone who's signed up to the group, although if the daily flow of emails is overwhelming you can catch up by visiting the group's web page instead.
All together now
We can take a punt that you're familiar with, if not already using, Gmail. And with your Gmail or Google account you've perhaps sussed out other popular Google applications such as the online calendar, the Google Talk instant message and voice chat service and Google Docs for web-based word processing, spreadsheets and even basic presentations.
Google Apps (www.google.com/a) rolls all of these together into a single package that Google promotes as being ideal for businesses, but they're just as attractive for a personal user. The basic Google Apps service is free and more than enough for the average user. You get all the standard Google applications plus mobile access to your email and calendar and a customised start page (a private page, rather than a website or blog that's open to the public).
One of the most appealing features is that you can set up Google Apps on your own domain name, which Google sells for $US10 a year. Instead of being tied to the email address issued by your ISP, you can buy a personal domain name through Google and use this as your main email address.
You can get your emails via the Gmail service, Google Apps start page or downloaded onto your computer's email software. The advantage is that you can change ISPs - to get better service, or take advantage of a cheaper deal - but still keep your email address.
Only US domain names such as .com and .net are available but they're automatically set up with Google Apps ready to roll. If you register an Australian domain name through a local registry or already have a domain name set up, you can arrange to set up Google Apps on this - but it's a relatively complex process, so you'll want to enlist the help of a very tech-savvy friend to handle it.
Get the Google Pack
The Google Pack bundles together a dozen free programs for Windows XP and Vista, although only half are from Google itself. The most useful is the Google Toolbar, which is a plug-in for both the Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers and has short-cut buttons to popular Google services. (You can also download the toolbar for both browsers directly from www.toolbar.google.com.)
XP users may also enjoy the Google desktop, which provides supercharged searching of your PC (including email messages and documents) and a Vista-like "side bar" that lives on your desktop.
The pack includes the Google Talk and Picasa applications, plus the breathtaking Google Earth, which lets you swoop from space down to almost street level in most countries. The latest version 4.2 also lets you reverse the trip and head out into space. You can see a map of the night sky above your location with stars, constellations and planets marked, or take a journey deep into the cosmos using high-resolution images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The rest of the Google Pack is a mixed bag: the RealPlayer software is of questionable value and we'd recommend the small and nimble Foxit PDF reader (free from www.foxitsoftware.com) above Google's choice of the bloated Adobe Reader. The StarOffice suite is good only if you need a no-cost alternative to Microsoft Office.
On the other hand, security programs such as Spyware Doctor and Norton Security Scan are well worth having, as is Skype. Fortunately, the download site (pack.google.com) lets you customise the contents of your Google Pack.
First published by Smh.com.au on April 22 2008
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