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Search = Google.com
For most of the world’s internet users, that’s just about it. There’s Google, and nothing else. People even enter Google into the Google search bar in browsers to bring up the Google.com homepage. It’s a mess.
But then, it’s not surprising that Google is so popular, simply because it works great for search. If you need to find something online, you’re almost guaranteed to find it with Google. And when it just works, and is blazing fast, why fix it? There are alternatives, most notably Microsoft’s Bing, which now powers Yahoo! Search as well. There’s also the underdog DuckDuckGo, which has somewhat of a geek following, but doesn’t seem to be that widely used.
I personally still use Google search, after periods of using both Bing, its predecessor, Live Search, and DuckDuckGo. I always end up coming back to Google. That apparently makes me like most of our search visitors, of which 96% use Google to find our articles.
How about you, our faithful readers? What search engine do you use by default? We’d love to hear your thoughts on why you use – or don’t use – Google.
When you think of web apps to use instead of Microsoft Office, odds are Google Docs is the first thing to pop into your mind. You might even think of Microsoft’s own Office web apps. But one of the largest suites of productivity apps online comes from Zoho.
Zoho’s online suite of office apps started in 2005, and has continued to mature and grow since then. Today, Zoho boasts over 7 million users around the world. And it’s no wonder why: Zoho has full-featured word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, database, project management, CRM, email, file sharing apps, and more. You can use them for free, or get business accounts cheaper than you could with Google or Microsoft. There’s so much Zoho offers, it’d actually be hard for anyone to use all of their apps. You can use Zoho tools to make a website, get stats on your site, invoice and track time, recruit new employees, collaborate with your team … or just write up a Word document.
That’s why we’re wondering how many of our readers use Zoho apps. We’d love to hear what Zoho app you use the most in the comments below!
Twitter continues to be the rising star in social networking, as businesses have latched onto it for its marketing power as an open network. Open, that is, as in public, not as in easy to develop for. 3rd party developers have continued to have trouble with Twitter, which has added user limits and other restrictions to their apps, making it rather obvious that Twitter wants its own apps to be the only full Twitter apps out there. There’s still plenty of apps that work with Twitter, but they’re mostly only for quick sharing to Twitter, and the development of full 3rd party Twitter apps has dropped dramatically.
What has increased are the 3rd party alternatives to Twitter, and the development of apps for them. Most notable has been App.net, the paid social network that’s strikingly similar to Twitter, only with a 256 character limit on posts and no ads. I joined during its initial funding stage last year, wrote about it here, and have continued to use it since daily at @maguay. It works great, though is still very similar to Twitter and continues to be interesting because of the people that are using it more than anything. It’s a friendly, helpful, techie community, though that’s because of the people on it, not the underlying tech.
I was wondering if any of the rest of you are using App.net. Have you tried it, and if so, what are your thoughts on the network?
