Busy @ Google

Google have been very busy recently, with Google Earth a few weeks ago, a new version of Google Desktop that features a sidebar that add the latest news, photos, weather and more to your desktop as well as searching and now they have just launched Google Talk.

Google Earth

Google Earth lets you view the globe from space and zoom into anywhere on the planet and can go to detailed satellite photos of many areas like the US and major UK cities. You can search for schools and restaurants and other places of interest and have them displayed on the map. It can even provide driving direction. The program is totally Free, it is impressive although to be honest I ahve had it installed for more than month and can't remember the last time I started it. The main reason for this is that the satellite images of the North East of England are rubbish, hopefully these will be added in the future then Google Earth will be excellent.

Desktop Seach & Sidebar
Google Desktop Search has been updated to version 2 Beta, I have had version 1 installed for ages and out of the search programs I had tried GDS was the best. The only major problem I had was it didn't search network drives and this was a big problem for me, most of my files are on network drives. I am happy to say that the lastest version add support for them :-)

The biggest addition that is immediately obvious is the sidebar, see the pic to the left (click for larger image). It can show you the latest weather, stocks, news, email and more. At 1st I thought what use is this going to be but I enabled it to try it. I have to say I am very impressed especially when it started showing me all my photos from "my pictures". Then as I browsed more it was showing more relevant news to me. Although the email part doesn't seam to work that well for me. It's supposed to show your Outlook email as well as Gmail but the Outlook part doesn't seam to refresh very often :-(

Definitely give it a go, in the next few days and weeks, I'm sure there will be loads of extra things added for the sidebar which will make it even more useful. Especially if all the hacks for Google Maps are anything to go by!!!

Google Talk
I installed Google Talk the day it cam out but other than that I've never used it. Partly because I don't know anyone else who has installed it to talk with.

It looks very basic and simplistic but I guess that's what Google excels at presenting people with simple to use applications that do what you need. Although I would imagine most people would find it hard to do away with many of the features of other IM clients that offer, Video, Dialing telephones, images and loads more. Maybe more features will be offered in the future I hope so. Otherwise I can't see many people switching over to it!