In case you didn’t, let me share my recent findings with you. While researching social media for a client recently I discovered some interesting (and some not so interesting) facts about social media, the internet and the Chinese.  Like, if you consider yourself one in a million in China, there are 1 300 people just like you!  I started my journey on Google, as it is the worlds number one search engine and then discovered that in the very near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.  Nooooo!  I like saying Google just as I like saying Hoover – I will hoover up that mess as soon as I’ve finished Googling the best place to buy a vacuum cleaner.

After trawling through pages of web and blog sites I found my first really interesting fact – that You Tube is the second largest search engine in the world.  And it is here that I discovered Pandora’s Box.  I will not delve too deeply into the facts, except to tell you that all of the Top 10 jobs of 2010, not one existed in 2004.  Really!  Do what I did – type “Did you know” into the You Tube search tool and expect to be amazed.  Video upon video of (I will not say all of them are) interesting facts, all of them user generated, await to spew their often anecdotal tidbits onto your screen.  Some are interesting facts for dinner table conversation ignitors, like the one about Barrack Obama not raising funds for his election campaign in the traditional manner, instead he raised $55 million via social networks, in just 29 days! Others are great for client presentations, like 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements.

So don’t ever get caught without an interesting fact again.  Apparently this is the Attention Age so pay attention dammit!

I search a lot and therefore made Google my home page. And if over 70% of the worlds internet traffic is going via Google, why not make it a destination rather than a launch platform?  Maybe it’s just my natural curiosity to click on links and maybe the general internet user has been spammed and virus’ed to death and that’s why they don’t explore more.  I also was quite tired of bouncing between all my favourite sites getting my daily dose of news, weather, fun and more. So one day I clicked on iGoogle and my life was changed forever.

You too can have a home page like this

I now choose Themes to suit my mood, I choose content from all my favourite sites to satisfy all my daily requirements, including Facebook and direct access to my Gmail account. I even have a virtual Koi pond filled with fish (that I feed when I remember).  It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s iGoogle.  Go do it now and impress your friends.

No, we kid. We know people who still read books. Okay, we still read books. In spite of the Internet taking over the world, even those of us obsessed with finding the next killer start-up, website, web tool or can’t-live-without app have to step away from the glare of our computer screens every now and again.

The problem is, being able to Google absolutely anything and everything, down to our own mothers’ names, means that we, okay I, have lost the ability to remember anything. Which means that when people, especially cute people (read ‘guys who I’m trying to impress with my immense intellect and quirky reading tastes’), ask me the above questions I’m often struck dumb. I know I’ve read a lot of books. (Really, I have.) I know I enjoyed a lot of them. I just don’t know any of their names. I can remember what they were about, I can even remember some of the character names, but mostly, for the life of me, I just can’t remember the title or author.

Thank goodness I remember Google, at least. And by ‘Google’ I mean the Internet at large. Because thanks to a bunch of literary genius websites I can now sound as intelligent as I know I am. Somewhere inside me. Deep inside.

First port of call when trying to remember the name of a book or author would have to be Google. Naturally. Google Book Search, specifically their Advanced Search Page allows you to type in a character name, a line of dialogue or any other obscure memory of the book you’re searching for and comes up with surprisingly accurate results.

A couple of other websites good at (book)worming titles and authors out of thin air are:

BookFinder: you can search over 150 million new, old, rare and out of print books by typing in keywords.

Askville: a search service from Amazon where one can ask and get answers in discussion boards centred specifically around books. Just type in your memory of the book and no doubt someone, someone with a better memory than you, will come back with a title and/or author.

Yahoo Answers, is said to be growing by 11 million new answers per month – that’s a lot of answers, works similarly, as do Answerbag and Answers.

Once you’ve found out the names and authors of books you once loved, you can then go to WhatShouldIReadNext? for recommendations on similar books. Enter a book you like and the site will analyse a database of real readers’ favourite books to suggest what you could read next.

Or you can just use all these sites to pretend you’re well read. Not that that’s something I’d do myself, of course.

On Monday we covered Bing - which is proving to be a very exciting search tool with nice integration options….today Google Squared started bubbling in the labs so we’ve given that a whirl.

Google Squared takes extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. It looks like a homework dream and for most of us it having many related search results on one page will save time and add information context. You can also start with a blank screen and build your own search spreadsheet….the applications are pretty powerful.

I searched ‘Romantic Movies’ as an example….

Read the comprehensive TechCrunch review also which includes a video demo.

“You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.”

Andrew Keen again:  “I would argue Google can’t make money on content, but take no responsibility for this content when it flouts the law. For better or worse, Google is a media company that should, like all other media companies, have responsibility for the content posted on its site. And given the company’s phenomenal profit margins, Google could actually afford to hire a small army of flesh-and-blood editors (people, not an algorithm) to guarantee that no more self-evidently illegal videos, such as the disgusting Down Syndrome cellphone example, get published on its site.”

And I would argue that we have to be very careful of imposing censorship on the internet (Andrew’s flesh-and-blood editors – who are they anyway?) because let’s face it, the internet is the only shot we as a species have at truly free communication.  BUT  self-censorship - removing offensive stuff when users object to it - should go some way to deterring cretins from insulting normal people with their god-awful efforts.

Tests of the new system by the Google’s Philanthropy unit have so far suggested that the system may be able to detect regional outbreaks 7 to 10 days before they are reported, allowing the vulnerable and weak to be inoculated before the levels of risk become too high. This could really save lives and stop the spread of disease.