Googled

You gotta admit Google has some cool little gadgets. I have waxed eloquent about gmail and Google reader in the past. In honor of me now using Google's Blog Site, let's look at some of Google's other online applications.
Google maps!!!! Dump Mapquest and any other map site. Google maps is by far the best! It's better at locating places and certainly better at giving directions. It will also link you to the websites of the businesses you are searching for and has reviews from others who've frequented the business.

I would have diiiiieeeed to have Google Scholar while I was in school. It searches scholarly publications for information on your search subject. So instead of searching in main Google and getting the Wikipedia entry (which any student knows is a big no no to cite), you get only scholarly publications with a pedigree to make any paper look snazzy.

I don't use Google Documents often. My excel use borders on programming which Google Documents can't handle. But it would be extremely useful if I was working on projects with others.

I've never personally used Google groups, but my father swears by it. He uses it to get other programmers' help with especially tricky programming problems. I'm sure they also have groups for just about any other topic under the sun as well!

Google Books lets you search for books. If it's out of copyright you can go ahead and read it online. If not, it will give you a link to buy the book. It will also list reviews for the book and other information. I actually like their information setup more than Amazon which I find can be rather disorganized and uninformative.

Other programs they offer: a photo sharing site, a youtube like site, a shopping search, a news site (though I'm a bigger fan of the Yahoo! news site), an image search, a blog search (though I searched for my blog and it didn't find it :( ), a finance site, a patent site (you can search over 7 million patents), a Diigo style bookmarking site, a translating site, and Google Sketchup (I will write another post about this one. An AMAZING free application.)