Googling Friday

Hello and welcome to what may become a weekly or bi-weekly blog on all things Google.

Brief history

Google started out as just a search engine way back in 1998. Today instead of saying “I did a web search” many people say “I googled (said topic)”. Today Google offers its own free email service known as Gmail, a photo sharing site known as Picasa, its own RSS Reader web app, and Google Voice which allows you to set up 1 phone number to ring multiple phones and the ability to place calls through it. It also owns YouTube which it purchased in 2006. Google is valued around $42 Billion with revenues of $23 billion as of 2009. So with a background done lets dive right into this weeks Google feature.

Google Voice

One of my favorite Google apps is Google Voice. This service recently went public to everyone, but my wife and I have been using it for quite sometime. What it allows you to do is have one phone number which you get to choose when setting up an account and use that number to be your primary contact, in turn you can choose which phones (home, work, cell) for it to ring based on which groups you set it up for.

Example, say you want your family to call the both the landline and the cell you can do that, you can also have your friends group contact your cell phone only. You can also text message from your desktop using your Google Voice number to other peoples cell phones.

But the biggest feature at least for my wife and I has been the ability to use Google Voice to call out using which ever phone you want at no cost within the United States and Canada. What this basically means is we can use our landline for Google Voice to call, once answered it immediately contacts the phone number you specified on the Google Voice app. Even though you are on your landline, you are not being charged for the call because of course Google called you first.

You may want to inform your family and friends of your Google number cause when it calls them and they have caller ID, it will show that number and not your landline or cell #. The quality of the calls are awesome! I can’t say enough about this service and if you are reading this directly from my website you will notice the Google Voice icon on the right side to leave me any feedback.

Well, that will do it for this first edition of Googling Friday. See you next week for another Google feature. Have a great weekend!