It seems that google is the hot topic lately. After posting about it last week, a number of other Google related articles have come to my attention.

For a number of years Google has been publishing various search statistics on Google zeitgeist. Whatsuppop.com has turned zeitgeistinto an rss feed for them. Get your daily does of zeitgeist delivered straight to your aggregator.

LifeHacker has another couple of interesting google links. The Google search index of Google’s free community and discussion group service, Google groups, now supports email alerts. The article also points to more information on the Google blog - Staying Alert. Another article links to GMail Drive shell extension a nifty tool that turns GMail into a 2Gig drive on your computer. All it requires is IE 6+. I’m going to try it out tonight.

Both LifeHacker and Google blogs have links to the announcement that Google maps now supports Hybrid mode. Hybrid mode is a tight integration of the street map mode a satellite image mode of google maps. I like that it is very easy to use, does a good job of displaying the information the user (me) expects to see, and that they easily provide the ability to switch between the 3 modes at the click of a button. They do it all and keep it simple - a very good addition.

Trying to keep up, and building a half a product, is a competitive offering from MSN - msn virtual earth. MSN Virtual Earth is the equivalent of google maps - without hybrid view, missing satellite photos of many locations, and some of their satellite images are not current.

Searching for Vancouver BC on MSN virtual earth displays one result - International House Vancouver BC University Worldwide. At least it’s in Bellingham , just a couple hours drive from Vancouver. Google seems to know where Vancouver is(65 results).

MSN puts in a good effort - but like many Microsoft products it focuses on being feature rich instead of being simple. To get the above permalinks to Vancouver and Bellingham, I had to select the appropriate search dialog, then popup a new window then copy the text in the new window. With Google all I had to do was click the permalink button and copy the contents from my address bar. MSN did offer the ability to display multiple search results, while google does one at a time. But the quality of the google search results, as well as the quality and relevance of the satellite imagery definitely makes google maps my choice; at least for now. MSN should have ironed out its quirks before launching.

The popularity of these products is primarily driven off of the technologies they employ, not the quality of product they deliver. Anil Dash points out that

“The criteria for success include things like “It made my client pay faster.”, “It reminded me to collect from someone that hadn’t paid.” or “It reduced overhead in creating an invoice.”. I’m disheartened that so many people, especially those in the design community who are (ideally) focused on creating a good experience for users, don’t judge an application by the goals it’s supposed to accomplish.”