Google is not just Google
Google – “A search Engine for a common man” was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the year 1998 with a view to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, is not just a search engine. They began with an idea of the search engine but as the idea evolves, the concept goes more vital and within just 16 years they have captured almost every online sphere and considered as the most successful online company.
If we give a thought, can company with just its search engine can be so successful that it hires more than 46,000 employees? Will it be justified? The Google is not just about its Search Engine or Gmail, though these two are the most important features/products of Google but Google is much more. The idea of Google is to provide a platform so that if a user comes on it, he should not move to anywhere else. The idea is quite successful as now a day’s Google has provided almost everything that an online user demands. We will discuss some of the important features of Google that may be ignorant to common internet users and are useful in becoming Google as a PaaS (Platform as a Service).
The impact of Google search is so impressive that people have replaced terminology of search with Google as for example many people used to say “Just Google It” instead of saying do search on internet. Google search has many remarkable options/features that many common internet users are unaware of. Almost 70% of the internet users are only just using the simple search and they are so satisfied with the results that they tends to ignore the advanced search options. Some of the advanced search features/tools that Google provides are Weather Search, Stock Quotes, Time Search, Sports Score, Sunrise & Sunset, Book Search, Public Data (like population of particular city), Synonym Search, Dictionary Definitions, Spell Checker, Movie Show Timings, Local Data, Flight Tracking, Currency Conversion, Image Search and the list goes on.
Another most important feature that has put back the leading companies like Yahoo, Hotmail and Rediffmail is the Gmail. The Gmail is so easy is to use and is so user friendly that even a layman can operate Gmail very efficiently. Many users have shifted their accounts from other mail networks to Gmail. The interface and the options are so advanced and useful to users that users cannot afford to go to any other platform. The idea is the same to give comfort to user and not let user go to any other platform for a service that Google is also offering.
Another important product of Google is Docs or Google Docs which is an office on the Cloud. The office here means the MS-Office and the Cloud means the Internet. The Google has provided such a wonderful feature that can be useful to many. Suppose you have an internet connection but no MS-Office on the system and you want to change something in your presentation that is going to be held after ten minutes in your Director’s conference room, then what will you do? The simplest way is to upload the file to Google Docs, it will open the file and you can edit the changes, save the file and again download from Google Docs. It is so simple but only if you know about Google Docs. The idea is conceptualized as the Software as a Service (SaaS).
Drive another best ever online application released by Google in 2012. It enable users cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. Google provides 5 GB online storage space in which you can keep your important files that you may need on the go and also you can share the files with other users. Google docs are linked with the drive and you can open the files within the drive. You can perform all basic operations that you can perform on your computer drive like create folders, upload files, delete files etc.
Free online SMSs are in demand these days and Google has also captured this sphere, but this feature is not known to many of its users. Google has integrated its SMS application with Gmail in which a user can send up to 50 SMS and can receive SMSs like chat. For every received message the counter of messages will increase by 5 (maximum up to 50). This feature has added an edge to Google’s hold over the online users.
Google Translate is a wonderful tool, which is very useful in offices that are doing official paperwork in their native language. The tool accepts a word or a string or a paragraph and converts it into the native language that you choose. It is so simple for the users to work with the native language because to build vocabulary in native language is very difficult as compared to English. Google Translate supports over 80 worldwide languages.
These are just few features/products of Google that could be very useful to common internet users, but there are more than 130 products/features/services of Google that could be useful in one or the other sense. The idea of Google to integrate various services at a single platform and provide the user free of cost facility with just one username and password is PaaS. So do not think Google as a Search engine because Google is not just Google.