.. but it's time for some Google ranting. Google products have impressed me twice this morning, and I figured this deserved a post.

Google Maps. Yes, I know this is hardly new. But sometime recently they've ramped up their mapping data for Australia, so you can finally search for places and see roads properly here. I also noticed that by setting my default location, any ambiguous searches (like just a road name) gets me the result that's in my area. Simple and obvious, and yet no other mapping service I've found comes even remotely close to being this easy to use.

Also, I've been looking for housing in Adelaide lately. The real estate site has a display mode which plots all your search results on a google maps page. Not only is this good for people unfamiliar with the area who have no idea about suburb names, it actually allows you to drill down and see exactly where main streets are, and what parks etc are nearby.

Secondly, Google Reader. I switched from Bloglines a while ago, and it's mostly been great. Two things that have been sorely missed though is the ability to specify weather to show posts oldest-first (good for comics) or newest-first (good for high-volume sites). The other thing was that it was cumbersome to go to the feed settings page every time you wanted to rename a feed, or move it to a different folder.

Thankfully, both of these issues have recently been fixed (and in a much better way than Bloglines did). It's good to have such useful improvements happening so quickly. In a feat of irony, the only feature I'm still waiting on is search...