Google was one of the first search engines I had come across. I was quite unfamiliar with the choice out there when I initially got the internet and was using all sorts of obscure engines as well as the likes of Yahoo but found them not as useful for quickly hunting down information as I would have liked. Google was then recommended to me as one of the best search engines out there and that I might get along much better with that.

However upon arriving at the google site, it's apparent that google is not a standard search engine. Granted there are literally billions of pages, where even obscure searches will result in vast numbers of hits but this is only part of the appeal. In addition to this if we for instance wanted to search for a particular image, we can quickly navigate to the images section and type in our search.

Likewise although it certainly doesn't better the sheer volume of videos available on youtube, google offers google video also. This is a great alternative due to the fact that there are a wide variety of videos available from documentaries, to comedy, to light hearted weird nonsense.

Also of great interest is google maps which we can use to find any location in the world and what's more the area can be zoomed in on to get a much clearer idea of what a place looks like. Therefore providing you have a decent graphics card, we can zoom in on any particular location with terrific sharpness and resolution.

You can also sign up to google mail which is an alternative for the popular hotmail. The advantage to google mail is the space provided in your inbox is vastly greater than hotmail and the like. and in addition there are a whole of other sub categories to narrow down searches.

Overall google works very quickly, is very smooth to use, it uses very little of the computers processing power and is almost 100 percent reliable. One note of criticism though is that as I am sure you are aware it also owns youtube and it has become apparent that at the very least it has started to become over zealous when it comes to censoring content on there. This is very unfortunate but hopefully other alternatives will arrise which again provider another avenue and make google think twice about such policies.