google rocks!

i heard somewhere that google is very big on good ideas coming from anywhere. at one point every engineer had one day a week where he could work on his own pet project. there are open channels of communication for anyone who wants to submit an idea. this fusion of PhD's and MBA's has created some very cool products.

i'm sure you've heard of google earth (now with a flight sim built in), igoogle, picasa, sketchup, and some others: some more google products.
even the simple ubiquitous google search has some cool tricks that you may not know about: google search help

the reason this topic even came up is that i just implemented a custom search for my blog (re:upper right corner of this page) and google analytics so i can keep track of everyone who comes (or doesn't come) to this site. and the kicker is that it's all free! of course you can pay if you want more functionality but it's amazing what you get for free! sometimes i'm amazed to find out that some really innovative simple product was not produced by google.

yup, i'm definitely a google cheerleader.. not only because they are a really cool company but also because when you type my name in google search i'm still the number one result. ;)

the best place to work in the world?

what i use (in order of useage):
http://www.igoogle.com/
http://www.google.com/
www.google.com/calendar
http://www.gmail.com/
http://www.images.google.com/
http://maps.google.com/
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.blogger.com/
http://finance.google.com/
http://earth.google.com/
http://sketchup.google.com/
http://docs.google.com/
http://picasa.google.com/
http://www.froogle.com/
http://video.google.com/