Tina’s recent articles on Google and search engines has made me think about how much search engines play in our daily online lives and in particular how much we rely on Google to do that searching for us. Google’s share of the search market accounts for as much as 60% , which competitors such as Yahoo and Microsoft probably pretty much consider insurmountable (leading to Microsoft’s ridiculous schemes such as Live Search Cashback, which many people have dismissed as nothing more than bribing people to use Microsoft’s search engine).

I have not been much of an online mapper up until now (give me a map and I guarantee to get you even more lost than before!) but while I was casually surfing around the other day, I somehow happened to land upon Google Maps.

When researching possible stories, I sometimes use the Stumbleupon toolbar button but I recently came upon two other toolbar buttons which pretty much perform the same function. You may be interested in using them yourself for surfing the web.

Google’s “Picks For you”

This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).

I did some research on iPhone specific websites and found out, to my surprise, that there were quite a few out there. Aibek has covered iiPhone web apps before, but here’s a small list of more websites specifically designed for the beautiful iPhone.

Information / News Web Apps :

CBS News: www.cbsnews.com/iphone
Fox News: iphone.foxnews.com
Google: Google.com
Reuters Mobile: mobile.reuters.com
BrainyQuote: www.brainyquote.com/iphone.html

Social Apps :

Digg: www.digg.com/iphone
Facebook: iphone.Facebook.com
Twitter: m.twitter.com/login

Reference:

Wikipedia: www.keishi.net/ipodia/
People Finder: www.2robots.com/iphone/#_ByNumber
Urban Dictionary: www.idotg.com/apps/iwurd.php
Realtor: iphone.realtor.com

Weather Web Apps :

AccuWeather: apple.accuweather.com/widget/iphone1/iphone.html
Weather Underground: i.wund.com
Weather.com: www.weather.com/iphone

While writing my own blog actually I found that a Wiki was the best way to convey some information. If you too own a blog you may want to write some more detailed guides, build knowledgebases and so on. I can think of at least a dozen of reasons why you may need one.

Show off your product in an in-depth, much more technical way, allow others to contribute to this with their own experiences, you could also use it as a personal blog form, a way to manage your information, a way to collaborate with others, the uses are endless. The reason that a Wiki is so powerful is that it is not constrained to one of these uses, you can use it for all at once.

I have an old 20GB iPod and even though I have a lot of music on there, I am only taking up half of the space available. So there’s another 10GB kicking around doing nothing and so I decided to start putting some useful iPod tools on there for when I’m on the move. Some of that space was allocated for installing one of my favourite websites - Wikipedia.