The other day, I shared with you Google’s new music search function. In an never-ending effort to improve the quality of your life, I bring you two more ways Google can make your life better. The first is tangible. The second is just interesting/thought-provoking.

1) You can set up your regular voicemail through Google Voice:

It sounds boring, but it’s actually pretty cool. You can basically have calls that you miss on your cell phone forwarded to your Google Voice voicemail. There, you can customize endless settings, including having specific greeting messages for specific callers (one for when your boss calls, one for when your friends call, etc.), you can save your voicemails forever, search them, email them, Google Voice will transcribe the voicemails and email them to you, send you texts, and if you ever switch numbers or carriers, all the voicemails stay with you.

I’ve done it. It works really well. So, next time you call me and try to leave a voicemail, I may have a personal greeting just for you…if you’re lucky.

You can read more about it, and how to set it up through this NY Times article: Google Voice ‘Lite’ — No New Number Required

2) Google provides a sneak peak into our collective brain:

Some of you may have it turned off, but when you normally start to type something into the Google search box, Google starts to return suggestions of what you might be looking for before you’re even done typing. That’s because Google is way smarter than you, and it also has data from millions of other searches to compare against.

Google doesn’t reveal its search algorithms, but the company’s engineers confirm that what we’re looking at in [Google Suggest] is, essentially, a list of the most popular queries that start with a given prefix. (It’s unclear what time period the suggestions are culled during, but a spokesman says they’re generated from “recent [search] activity.”) A suggestion-enabled search is like an instant popularity contest. Just type in a couple of letters, and you’ve got access to oodles of data on what your fellow Web surfers are hunting for.

Slate has an interesting piece in which they go through and compare ‘intelligent’ searches vs. ‘unintelligent’ searches. It’s humorous and also quite revealing about how different people tend to use Google to reach different ends. There are numerous different comparisons that you can check out, but here’s just one to whet your appetite:

The ‘unintelligent’ (aka Philly) search. Luckily, I’ve never even considered searching for something with using
2 as to.



The ‘intelligent’ search. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever started a search with ‘how might one’ either…



Pretty interesting differences. You can read many more of them on Slate: Awkward Suggestions, or if you need to waste three minutes of your day, you can just try some out for yourself here.



Although, I must admit, sometimes Google doesn’t know what it’s doing…