Without a doubt, Google is taking over the world. Mainly because it was the first company to understand that search matters. Back in 1999, the Yahoos, Excites and Altavistas of the web were busy positioning themselves as portals, not search companies. CEOs weren’t apologetic about it either – one famously explained “as long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”

In the end, though, the CEO was wrong – users do care about search. Portal companies are drying up and pure search is having a renaissance. Competitors like Teoma are springing up to give Google a run for the money. But the original is already miles ahead. While Google has a reputation for being laser-focused on search, that’s only partly true. Wisely, Google has defined its mission in the broadest sense: helping people find information on the internet more easily. Hence the addition of features that any religious Google user (and the number of self-proclaimed Google zealots grows daily) depends upon: the dictionary links in the blue bar, or the ability to find stock quotes or maps just by searching for tickers or addresses. And with the ability to search within the web’s Word documents, PDF files and newsgroup postings, Google’s reach and power continues to grow.

Beyond all this, Google has been banging out a number of other features – ones that have yet to go mainstream. Check them out now, and glow with the smugness of the early adopter:

Google News

News aggregation and a news-specific search.

Google Catalogs

Google-powered catalog shopping.

Google Compute

Distributed computing project to put web surfers’ unused processor power to work on a cure for cancer. (While this isn’t yet available to the general public, you can sneak into the beta here. )

And, of course, you shouldn’t miss the best piece of Google fiction ever written.

If you don

We download the beta. We waste money on electronic gadgets, then take them apart. We hack the kernel. We secretly like Scheme. We

Admittedly, I’ve always been a bit of an audiophile. I listen to a lot of music, and with so many years of playing myself, I’m fairly particular about accuracy of sound. Still, about a week ago, I worried I might have gone completely over the the deep end when I found myself dropping $300 for a pair of Etymotic Research earphones. Since they arrived this morning, however, I’m convinced this could be some of the best money I’ve spent.

Mainly, Etymotic makes very high end hearing aids, and their earphones are an extension of that technology. Tiny flanged earbuds, they fit more like earplugs than traditional in-the-ear headphones, sitting deep in the ear canal and sealing out background noise (25db isolation). But what sets them apart is their sound – without a doubt, the most richly detailed, deliberately accurate that I’ve ever heard reproduced. Better, in fact, than speaker systems I’ve used which sell for nearly 50 times the price. In the words of a colleague who gave the Etymotics a whirl: “holy shit!” Or, further: “it sounds like the music is happening inside my head. You’ve ruined me for life. Now I’ll have to buy a pair of these and I’ll never again be able to listen to my Sony’s.”

Come on, you know you want a pair. Sure they’re ridiculously priced. But, after all, it’s only money.

From Joel Spolsky’s otherwise mediocre User Interface Design for Programmers:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.