How Does Google Work?

The dual finance/tech sides of me find this to be fascinating.. Click on the picture to get the full effect of how Google makes your search query work (and how it makes money off it).

via http://the99percent.com/

Trying out the Pano app on my iPhone

4 pictures stitched together to make a panorama

Taken at Lands End on Bailey Island, ME.

Does Google Own Us?

Paranoia or prudence? Thought-provoking take on the Google empire.

via Hungry Beast

Browser Usage Stats: Chrome Grows While IE and Firefox Shrink

An analytics company called Net Applications has determined that Google’s Chrome web browser is stealing market share from both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

In January, Chrome grew by 0.57% to 5.20% of the browser market. Meanwhile, Firefox shrunk by 0.20% to 24.41% and IE shrunk 0.51% to 62.18%. Safari and Opera both stayed put, more or less; grew 0.05% to 4.51% and shrunk 0.02% to 2.38%.

You might recall that Chrome passed Safari to grab third place in the browser market a month ago; it seems probable that the ground Chrome is gaining is at Microsoft and Mozilla’s expense, although no direct causation has been definitively established by Net Applications’ numbers.

Chrome has a number of advantages, not the least of which is the fact that it’s much faster than the competition. It’s been derided for its lack of certain valued features in the past, but has gradually been introducing them. For example, it just put extensions and bookmark sync into its live Windows build a week ago. Google has been running ad campaigns on sites like, and it seems like it’s been working.

Now the Bad News: Internet Explorer 6

5.20% of the market is actually impressive for a browser as new as Chrome, but Internet Explorer still dominates. IE8 takes up 22.31% of the market and IE7 carries 14.58%, but it’s upsetting to see that IE6 on its own is still the second most popular browser version (behind IE8) at 20.07%.

At Mashable, we’ve made it clear that we believe IE6 must die. It has stifled innovation and left its users vulnerable to security threats for too long, and compared to modern browsers it’s a hassle to use.

Google agrees, and so do many other companies; that’s why it’s phasing out support for the browser, hoping that in doing so it can convince users to either upgrade to a newer version or switch to a competing browser like Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

The good news is that this seems to be working, albeit very, very slowly. IE6 has been declining gradually for months. It just can’t happen quickly enough.

via feedproxy.google.com

Now that they've begun supporting extensions, I'm becoming an even bigger Google Chrome fan. Blazing fast..

What Are Yeux Deuxing?

Ran across this on another blog that listed a few of the author's favorite online tools. Tuexdeux was one of them. Looks interesting..

Easier Way To Back Up Your Data

Lately I've been trying Dropbox, which is a web-based file backup tool that synchronizes across multiple computers. So far I'm really impressed. I used to find that I did all my work on one computer (my desktop), because that's where most of the data was saved.

But with Dropbox, I can download the tool on both my desktop and laptop, create folders and put the files in them, and access all of them no matter which computer I'm on. And if I'm away from both of my computers, my files are also accessible on the internet at www.dropbox.com.

This is all free for the first 2 GB of storage, and premium versions are available for $9.99/mo up to 50 GB and $19.99/mo for up to 100 GB. I think that's a little pricey for backing up large amounts of data (like pictures, music, etc.). I use Carbonite for that - it's much cheaper and there's unlimited storage. But for nimble access to everything else, you can't beat the usability and price of Dropbox.

You can check it out here.

Language Cheats

I love Google. They just continue to roll out new, free tools.

Google Translate is one of their newest services, and it offers the ability to translate words from one language to another as you type, in real time. If you upload a document, it will translate the entire text to the language of your choice. It also has a speech feature that helps you determine how to say a word with just a click of the mouse.

I can't necessarily see how I would use this very often, but the usability of it is really cool. The video below is a tutorial from Google on how the tool works.

Google Just Made Garmin Pretty Irrelevant

Google just introduced another product. It's called Google Maps Navigation, and it provides GPS guided turn-by-turn navigation for free.

For now, it's only available on phones with Google's Android operating system, but I have no doubt it will be rolled out to many more devices before very long. The days of paying for this kind of information are clearly numbered, courtesy of the good folks in Mountain View, CA.

If You're Upgrading To Windows 7, You Might Like This

I ran across this tool today and I'm pretty impressed. Ninite is a simple and free web-based tool that installs the latest versions of multiple software applications on your computer, allowing you to run the setup process for each of them at the same time. You run it right from their web page, and it doesn't install any of its own software. Very nice little time saver.

This comes in particularly handy right now when so many are upgrading their operating systems to Windows 7. It's a good bookmark!