URL:

1. Google Maps: http://maps.google.com
2. Google Books: http://books.google.com/
3. Google Squared: http://google.com/squared
4. Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets
5. Google News Timeline: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
6. Google Similar Images: http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
7. Google Audio Indexing: http://labs.google.com/gaudi

What is Google?

I would hope by now anyone on the internet has at least heard of Google, if not, here’s some history…Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31)[update], the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running millions of servers worldwide, which process about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour. Google conducts hundreds of millions of search requests every day. (via Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Google

Google is more than just a company trying to organize the world’s information and making it easily searchable.  Google offers a variety of methods of obtaining content on the internet, such as the 7 methods mentioned above.  Furthermore Google also offers a variety of web tools and services such as email clients, advertisement options, web analytics, and ridiculously much more.  Its actually quite remarkable what can be done with Google.  I’m done talking, go play.

Here’s a video on 7 Google search techniques that are really cool:

URL:

http://www.bing.com

What is Bing?

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine.  Bing is an intuitive search engine that tries to assist you in better searching.  It does this by offering suggestive terms and providing you content preview of your search results to help you refine your search of content on the internet.

What you may not know about Bing

Bing has multiple search features to not only search for articles and news related content.  Bing features an extensive search for multimedia such as images and video.  Bing has a collection of search refining tools for images and video.  For instance, you can search images and filter out images of people only by head shots.  Or hover your mouse over video results to see a preview of the video.  Bing is putting up a strong effort towards Google and their domination of finding content for users on the internet.

Here’s a quick video on Bing:

URL:

http://www.slideshare.net

What is Slideshare?

Slideshare allows its users to upload, share and collaborate on powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Word documents.  Many times speakers at differente events and seminars put up their presentations on Slideshare to share with its viewers.  This means you can search thousands upon thousands of powerpoint presentations from many popular events and seminars held worldwide.

What you may not know about Slideshare

Not only can you find powerpoint slides and Word documents, you can favorite and tag them to quickly create your own library of presentations.  Furthermore, on the right side of the presentation is the option to view related presentations to further your learning.  So stop using Google and Wikipedia as your only news source and start being more intuitive on your content learning.  Download powerpoint presentations on your topics and continue to broaden your knowledge presented by others.

Here’s a quick video on Slideshare:

URL:

http://www.youtube.com

What is Youtube?

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS and the BBC and other organizations offer some of their material via the site. (read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know you can do with Youtube

If you may not know already, Youtube users are currently limited to 10 minute video uploads, but using a few Youtube techniques you can add videos longer than 10 minutes.  In short, crop you video into 10 minute segments, upload them, create a Youtube playlist of your videos, then create a custom video player which plays your playlist, embed the video to your website or blog, voila, you have a Youtube video player that plays a video larger than 10 minutes.

Here’s a video on how to do this :

URL:

http://www.technorati.com

What is Technorati?

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati, or intellectuals. (read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Technorati

Technorati is a great tool for bloggers to get the competitive advantage.  Using Technorati you can learn what other bloggers are writing about a topic that you maybe writing about and you can see what the reaction is by the readers.  Find out what is working best on other blogs in your niche and do the same on yours.

Here’s a quick video on Technorati:

URL:

http://www.vistaprint.com

What is Vistaprint?

Vistaprint is a professional printing solution that can print hundreds of things from business cards to t-shirts.  With Vistaprint you can upload your own graphics or use their editors to create your designs just the way you want them.  On top of all this they’re cheap!

What you may not know about Vistaprint

With just a quick Google of ‘vistaprint coupons’ you can find even bigger and better deals on popular Vistaprint items.  If you can save, then why not save even more?!  Get prices slashed up to 90%!

Here’s quick video on how:

URL:

http://www.cubestat.com

What is CubeStat?

It is a tool that calculates an estimate of how much a website is worth based on the rankings on popular search engines and other website directories.  It gives you an estimated property value, page views, and earned daily Google Adsense.

What you may not know about CubeStat

You can browse a variety of sites previously saved in CubeStat by keywords.

Watch this quick video on CubeStat:

URL:

http://www.theonion.com

What is The Onion?

The Onion is an American “fake news” organization. It publishes satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news through an entertainment newspaper and website known as The A.V. Club. The Onion’s articles comment on current events, both real and imagined. It parodies traditional newspaper features, such as editorials, man-on-the-street interviews, and stock quotes, as well as traditional newspaper layout and AP-style editorial voice. Much of its humor depends on presenting everyday events as newsworthy items, and by playing on commonly used phrases. (read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know about The Onion

The Onion has a featured called Our Dumb World, that is a Google Maps mashup of articles on The Onion.  What this means is you can visually see a map of the world with Onion icons all over it.  Click on an icon to read that Onion “fact” or “news story”.  It’s definitely a cool way to visually see the different areas of the world The Onion has covered satirical topics on.

Here’s a quick video on The Onion:

URL:

http://www.wonderhowto.com

What is WonderHowTo?

WonderHowTo.com is a community-fueled, search engine and directory for Free How-To Video. With an index of more than 225,000 videos (October 2008), we provide the largest, most contemporary, and most diverse resource in this increasingly vibrant space.

What you may not know about WonderHowTo

WonderHowTo.com has a Firefox plugin that seemlessly finds “how to” videos related to other search on the internet.  Say you’re on Google, searching for new ceramic tiles, the WonderHowTo plugin will show you videos on how to install tiles.  Virtually for anything you’re searching for, the WonderHowTo Firefox plugin will show you a “how to” video so that you can complete your task.

Here is a quick video of me using the plugin: