Thing 29

Google Tools is a lot like a college student who graduates with 6 majors and then has no idea what to do. As cool as some of the ideas are I really wish Google would work on improving their admittedly good search engine instead of all these alpha/beta experimental thingees that don't always work the best. For every GoogleEarth there's a 1-800-GOOG-411. Great in theory (free info look-up service) but not so great in practice. I tried it, and it took me several times for the automated service to understand my city and state correctly.

Google Scholar is another bold venture that was begun and then just quietly languishes. How many years will it be in beta? Perhaps the best thing that could happen to Google is Bing, a pretty good search engine in its own right. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, good may not be good enough sooner than Google thinks.