Last Sunday was the Super Bowl. That meant companies would get to present their ad that they paid so much for to get it there. Google even paid the 2.5 millions dollars to get their commercial there advertising mostly their search functionality. It does include a few other things too such as, Google Maps.

The commercial is named “Parisian Love,” and follows a guy using the Google search to find ways to get after his French girl friend.

Be sure to check it out yourself:

I found a really cool….. well I don’t know what to call it.

Google has a thing where you can see how many seconds are left in the year. So why not tonight get out your laptop or computer and open up the Google Homepage?

To get to it you simply go to the homepage, and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Be sure you have not entered in anything into the search field. Right below the search box there is a countdown. It is the countdown to the seconds in the year. I wonder what happens when it reaches 0. Will it continue on to next year?

The only way to find out is to set up the computer by the TV, while watching the ball drop, and see what happens. I think this is a nice geeky way to spend your New Years Eve. If I feel like it, I might make a screen capture of it hitting the zero.

Here is another Google tips I pick up (from my “friends” at TWIT)…

Wanna know the weather where you are or where your going? You no longer have to wait forever for you favorite weather Website to load. Simple go to the fast loading homepage of Google and type in “weather in [insert your city here].

For example, in Google I typed in “weather in buffalo, ny.” Then I waited for the results to come up in the predictive search results. It will give you some search results. However, take a look at the bottom of the results… It give you a three day weather forecast of the location that you just typed in.

Maybe, someday Google will release its own weather server. Perhaps Google Weather.

Let me know what you though of this tip.

This little tips is something that you should know about if you live you life in the cloud. You could just use the calculator on your computer. But why not do it the geeky way? Next time you need to figure out some simple math, just go to Google.com and type in a quick math problem.

For example: 2+2=. Don’t click search. Wait for the predictive results to come up. In the results it will give you the answer to the problem. Of course you can use more complicated problems like, 6+3(5*6)= and it will still give you the answer.

I would hope that someday Google makes their own calculator service. In the serve, I would love it to include a graphing calculator. That would be a useful tool for any student that doesn’t have access to a graphing calculator at home.

I hope you, at sometime, employ this tip into your routine.

I was very excited to learn that Google finally released their own browser for the Mac a couple of weeks ago. I always used Google Chrome when I was a Windows User. Since moving to the Mac, I became a real fan-boy of Safari. I liked the fastness of it.

So I downloaded Google Chrome:

After I downloaded and installed the browser (which was very fast), I was disgusted by the dullness of it. It was the Mac-link interface with the silver/grey color window. However, they made it look horrible on their browser. I was really hoping for the nice and cool looking that you see on the windows version of the browser.

After I forced myself to get accustomed (somewhat) to the ugliness of it, I started to browse around with it. It was the fastest browser I have ever used. Fast than Safari, Opera, and certainly faster than Firefox on my computer. It certainly got a very big workout with all the tabs I had open, 30 of them to be exact. Even with that many tabs open it kept going smoothly.

More on stability:

Speaking of stability, I had chrome running 24/7 for about three days before it started to crash and break. All I needed to do was close out of the browser and restart. Now I have been running the browser straight for about 2 weeks without any crashes. One feature I have liked since the version on Windows was that you can just close the tab that has crashed so you don’t have to close out of the browser and start over. If you ever find yourself having to close out of all your tabs, there is a great feature to find out what you closed last.

Earlier in this post, I was complaining about the look of the browser. But wa-la, I found a button to change the theme of the browser (Chrome>Preferences>Personal Stuff). This button brings you to a Google web-page. You can find a theme that you like and place it on the browser. Spent about 15 minutes trying out all the cool looking themes that they have. I went with a dark-blue theme for now. I chose it because I thought it would be the easiest of the eyes for me.

I have not found out anything about the extension that Google is supposed to let onto the browser. However, I am not so excited about them because I think extensions make the browser more bloated and slow.

Have you tried Chrome? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.