GOOGLE TURNS 15 today.
A mere adolescent, but the corporation has already given us so much.
Here are a few ways which we are forever grateful, and er, literally couldn’t function without it.
1. Search
Information? No need to store it in your brain any more, when Google is at your fingertips. Whether it’s settling that midnight pub wager or putting to rest the sorta stuff that keeps you awake at night.
2. Email and G Chat
Where would we be without Gmail? We’d still be using our xoxocyber_diva_2002xoxo@oceanfree.net emails and MSN, that’s where. Yeah, you bet your ass MSN would still be alive and kicking.
3. Maps
Seriously. How did people find their way around before the Google Maps app? Was there a time when we couldn’t visit other cities via the medium of street view? If so, please let us never speak of it again.
4. Docs
If there’s something work or school related that Google Docs can’t be used for, we don’t want to know about it.
Oh you’ve ‘attached’ the document? Nice try, grandma.
5. Scholar
Cheers for the perfectly adequate C+ in college, scholar. TurnItIn didn’t suspect a thing. Stand on the shoulders of giants? How about a piggy back?
6. Books
Yes, I’ve bought all four volumes of the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications for €1,420. Definitely not just chucking the paragraph I want into search to collect the page number to reference. Definitely not.
7. YouTube
We used to have to watch ‘You’ve Been Framed’ on a Saturday night to see cat videos and people falling over. Now we can do it while we’re on the clock.
One look and we’re gone.
8. Google +
If nothing else, it constantly reminds us that Facebook isn’t so bad after all.
9. Chrome
Saving us from the traumas of Firefox and, God forbid, Internet Explorer. Thank you, kind sir.
10. Reader
Changed our browsing lives… before it was cruelly snatched away from us, never to be seen again.
