LITTLE KNOWN WEB DELIGHTS

The Internet is like what the North Pole and the Moon used to be – a great, unexplored terrain with all sorts of life-changing phenomena, just waiting be discovered, and used for your betterment.

Of course, it depends on how you define ‘betterment.’ For many people that means having the computer spit out a can of Coke because they’re too lazy to get up and fetch one from the fridge themselves.

If you’re in the neighborhood of MIT, you can use your computer to conjure one up.

However, if you want your kids to get fresh air, you might consider the Internet to be the second most useless invention in human history, a close runner up to the TV.

But forget TV: the miracle of the Web is that there are sites that are not only fun, but amazingly useful, too.

Lots of these sites are part of the Google family. Google not only dominates web searching, but has also proclaimed that it wants to index all the electronic knowledge in the world.

To that end, it has developed various tools, like indexed searches of tens of thousands of publications .

Also, on-line versions of millions of print books ,

Google even indexes a compendium of the world’s mail-order catalogs .

There are many other Google indices.

The really interesting stuff is on the Google Labs page. Labs has a service called Google Suggest ; you start typing in a term, and the service will ‘autocomplete’ your request, based on common searches by other users.

Add to these the always entertaining Google Video Finder , which finds online home and professional videos posted on the Web, and the Google Ride Finder , where you can order a taxi online in several US cities.

Then there are the ‘undocumented’ Google features. Home chefs, for example, are gurgling for recipes. To find out what’s for dinner, go to Google’s home page and type in the word ‘recipe.’ Then type in the ingredients you have lying around – ‘chicken’, ‘potatoes’, ‘vinegar’ and Google googles a bunch of recipies featuring those ingredients – like Roasted Chicken Breasts with Roasted Onions, Potatoes and Balsamic Vinegar Recipe, my first selection on the list.

I don’t mean to focus exclusively on Google, because there really are lots of other interesting sites and services.

There are search engines you may not have heard about; for example ixQuick is a powerful ‘metasearch’ site that gleans the cream of the crop from ten search engines.

iTools has search boxes for the web, newsgroups, dictionaries, quotations – even for Google Video, all on one convenient page.

With all this searching, you might getg carried away and forget to do something really important. If you’ve got something important or something you want to make sure you remember, send yourself an email – in the future. You can send yourself a note that will be delivered to your inbox tomorrow – or in ten years.

Dennis Turner