Getting the best from Google

When Google started life in the mid-nineties, its purpose was to provide "a better mousetrap" in terms of searching the Internet. The Google solution to Internet searching was so good that within a short period of time millions of users had switched to using Google as their primary means of finding information online. The rest is history.

Things have changed. The Google philosophy of allowing staff to pursue "interesting projects" has yielded a vast selection of online services and software. The search engine remains the cash-machine of the Google enterprise, but increasingly one can find a "Google solution" to a mind-boggling number of computing tasks.

A Google Account

Possibly one of the easiest ways to get started with maximising Google is to set up a Google account. All you need to do this is a valid email address and a password.

Once you have setup the account and logged in you can access a considerable number of really useful tools and services.

Create your Homepage

One of the first things that you may want to do is customise your own homepage. The number of ways that you can customise your homepage are almost endless. You choose your own colours, graphics and gadgets. You can even have different homepages for different purposes

For example I have a homepage for work, one for leisure time, one dedicated to technology and another just for fun things. My work homepage contains gadgets which are useful during the working day, such as, Worldtime; Calendar; Weather; Finance Reports; Stock Market; Wiki; a Currency Converter.... and of course Calvin and Hobbes. One should not take work too seriously!!

After the working day I switch over to the homepage for leisure time which contains all sorts of leisure time information and gadgets.

Separate homepages can be used for more than simply separating work and pleasure. For example, I need to be able to communicate in more than just English. For this purpose a Google homepage setup specifically for language usage and translation is an excellent way to keep all my online language tools in one place.

How to do it

Google has always been good at providing clear, simple and detailed guides to their products. Setup a search argument for iGoogle (note the letter i before Google) and you find all the information that you need.

To start set Google as your search engine and then click on the words "Get Started" which appear just after "Don't have an iGoogle page?"

February 2009