Nunc Ubique Blog

Google had rolled out the Google suggest feature. Type in a few words on the search query box and Google would guess what you would want to search and suggest to you some search queries. It’s like Google is reading your mind.

Of course with this there are a lot of fun to have with. Try typing “Malaysia is ” or “Streamyx is ” or “Obama is ” whatever.

There are also some interesting uses of this feature. One of it is that you could quickly look for software alternative.

Let’s say that you are looking for an alternative to Photoshop, type in “Photoshop vs. ” or an alternative to Microsoft Office, type in “Microsoft Office vs “. Look at the suggested software alternative.

Do you have found any other useful uses of Google suggest? Tell us about it.

If you use Gmail for your email, Google reader for reading your RSS feeds, Google Calender to schedule your events, Picasa Web Album for all your photos, Blogger for your blog, Google Analytics to monitor your website and Google Docs for all your office word processing and spreadsheets, then you should realize how much data you are relying on Google.

Sure it’s easy to fall in love with a good service. You might still trust Google to stay and you still believe that Google will stick to their informal cooperate motto, “Don’t be evil.”

But what if that all change? A change in the management made Google evil. Or they just decide to pack it up and leave or sell the company to someone else? What would happen to all your data?

Which is why it is good there are initiative like Google Data Liberation Front which is a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products.

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google with a single goal to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They work with other Google product engineers to make sure there is a why to move your data. Their mission statement:

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

Visit dataliberation.org for more information.

Did you know that now you could search live Twitter updates on Google? Well yeah you could now. I also notice that sometimes Google includes Twitter updates in their search results. A little Twitter updates widgets sandwiched in between web and news results.

You could also have only Twitter updates within Google. Type in the latest Twitter trend you are interested in in the search box. On the result page right below the search box, there is a link, ‘Show options’. Click it and you’ll see on the left there are several links to search options. Click ‘Updates’ to have a live flowing Twitter updates.

My guesses is that this won’t only be for Twitter, but also Facebook status updates once Google could index them. Is this Google’s attempt for real-time search?

Next time whenever some major news breaks on Twitter, try using Google to keep track of updates, rather then Twitter’s search. Just a thought.