Why I'm Grateful For Google

Google, whether you like them or not, are here to stay. They've pretty much 'become' the internet over the past few years, leading the charge with all sorts of new technologies (or buying them up if someone's beaten them to it) and lately I've realised that their dominance of the internet is no bad thing. If anything, I'm kinda thankful for all the stuff they do, because it's all genius. Well, with the exception of Lively by Google, anyway.

The thing is, I'm only really starting to come to terms with how much Google 'does' the internet, in the same way that Microsoft 'does' Windows and Hideo Kojima 'does' storytelling mindf**ks.

This has very probably coincided with my acquisition of a T-Mobile G1, the first cellphone I've picked up in 3 years and the first one I've had at all with a decent load of features. My old Motorola exploded if you mentioned "camera" and thought MP3 was the rifle Heckler and Koch made a while before they made the MP5. As a man of necessity I only replaced it when it died within minutes of being turned on after an overnight charge.

And my G1 is lovely. It's lovely, though, because of the integration the Android operating system makes with your Google account. After tapping in your Google Account details, it'll download all of your Gmail contacts, all of your Google Calendar appointments, every last email in your Gmail inbox and set you up for YouTube and Google Talk instant messaging. All within the first few minutes of turning the phone on.

After this the genius of Google sort of dawned on me, like those epiphanies characters have in movies all the time. What was originally a fantastic search engine - although the engine of choice when I was new to the internet was Ask, back when Jeeves was the mascot - has evolved beyond what anybody could have predicted.

With one, single account, you can write documents online. You can watch videos and hold onto favourites to watch again later. You can manage every last email account you have from within a single browser window and manage all your RSS feeds in another, all from inside their own internet browser. You can blog (although, with an SG blog, why would you need to? ), get directions, explore the world in its entirety, search your computer faster than Windows ever could, complete purchases online, or even delve into archive upon archive of books.

What has astounded me is that Google offer all of this up for free - even Android, their cellphone OS, which is entirely open source - and ask for nothing in return other than advertising revenue. Which, of course, has brought in a lot of money for them, and that's something I wholeheartedly support.

Google is something of an internet Good Samaritan. Although they demand advertising commissions and the like from companies and businesses, to the average Joe like you and I they're offering up pretty much everything you could require on the internet (or, with the G1 and cellphones in future, on the go) gratis, and that's something worth celebrating.

With my G1 on the go, I can organise contacts and calendar dates when I'm out; when I come home to continue whatever it is I'm doing, everything's been synchronised with my Google account already from my phone, without any sort of prompt. Certainly, there's no syncing with Outlook on a G1, but when Gmail seems to be capable of doing the same job who needs it?

While I've missed Google's birthday by a few months now, I think I'm still allowed to say now that without the inception of the original search engine, the internet would be a very different place from what it is now. Microsoft would probably extract a miniscule part of your soul for every search you wanted to conduct, or something.

But then, when you look at Microsoft's business model, it's easy to concede that every Ying must have a Yang; and that's where Google comes in.

Like them or not, you can't help but be grateful for Google.