Life Before Google

July 22, 2010

Google was started in 1998 by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; it’s unofficial motto: don’t be evil. The search engine currently processes over one billion search requests every day, on over one million servers housed in data centers across the globe. It is the most visited website in the world, and we go to it for so many reasons that it’s hard to imagine what life was like before it.

Need driving directions? Go to Google Maps. Want to know the latest news on the iPhone debacle? Visit Google News. Need to organize your life online? Sign up for Google Calendar. Want free webmail? Gmail to the rescue! If you want to share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, Google Docs is the place to go. Google is such an important part of our lives that even the average second grader can tell you that it’s where you go when you need to know something, stat. Google has applications that many of us wonder how we lived without before their existence.

Google can make your daily life easier, and it can also make it more fun. The company has its own photo storage and editing program (Picasa),3-D modeling program (SketchUp), social network (Orkut), and VOIP service (Voice). Do you like the special logos Google features on holidays? You can see them all at Google Logos!

If you want to learn more about what’s brewing at Google right now, visit Google Labs, what the company refers to as its “technology playground”. Check out their program Open Spot, which works on the Google Android smartphone and helps people save time and money by alerting them to open parking spots. Or there’s Aadvark, which lets users submit questions and then helps them find the perfect expert to answer in just minutes. Or try Image Swirl, which states on its website that it “organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarity and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface.” What does that mean? You’ll have to go there to find out!

What can we take away from our journey through Google? The company, it seems, doesn’t sleep. Never one to rest on its laurels, Google values innovation and puts its money where its mouth is, and seems to be having a ball as it does. As we head into the second half of 2010, now is the time to ask yourself: where has your imagination taken you so far this year? At Tortus, we are here to help you imagine new ways of doing business that are, as we say, fun and profitable – not necessarily in that order!

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