The clout of Google

Oceans of love may or may not have been a song but Google seems to be sailing on it. What's special about this beautiful company is that it has from the beginning believed in people, invested in people and created the power of people. If you thought Google is merely a lovely search engine you are mistaken. Its hugely popular contextual advertising network, Adsense, has enabled millions of webprenuers to make money. In fact the amount of fillip Adsense has given to the web economy is simply unbelievable. (You cannot blame me of being partisan to Google. I have done a critical review of Adsense, too! You can view it here)

Gmail, the 1 gb email service from Google, is simply the best I have ever used. The speed is lighting. The filters are awesome. The storage is huge. The message search is phenomenal. What's more it's like having your own Outlook Express on the move that can be accessed on any computer in the world. The only minus is that I am unable to use my pop email on Gmail. But to overcome that I have diverted all my pop emails to my Gmail id to keep my branding intact and yet avail of this beautiful service.

Mr Money bags email service, Hotmail.com, seems zillions of years away and quite frankly it seems quite trashy with its irritatingly slow speed and useless storage. (They still haven't converted one of my older Hotmail a/c to 250 mb. They have given me 2 mb (that's 500 times less space than Gmail) and expect me to be gung-ho about it.) Read more on Gmail here.

Adwords, the instant way of getting leads for your business. Well Google may not enjoy total clout in this thanks to Overture, but that's not denying the fact that Adwords is a money spinner for Google. According to industry estimates, Google's 2004 Revenue is somewhere in the region of $3.2 billion.

Other stories of lust and seduction

Yahoo disclosed its plans to buy Flickr, a Web site that has won considerable buzz among the digerati as a place to store and share digital photography. Shortly afterward, Hewlett- Packard unveiled a deal to buy a similar company, Snapfish. Another interesting news is of IAC/InterActiveCorp's agreement to pay $1.85 billion for Ask Jeeves, the butler search engine. Acquisition that too of a search engine in these times of war. What's the inside story? More on this later.

About the author

Puneet Mehrotra is a web strategist at www.Cyberzest.com and edits www.MidnightEdition.com He is the Interent Economy Columnist for HindustanTimes.com

You can mail him on: ebiz333@yahoo.com