Ken Chan

Last year, Google announced that it was launching a preview release of Gmail, its supercharged seach-based webmail product with 1 Gig of free storage. This, in turn, probably lead Yahoo to unveil its “New and Improved” Yahoo! Mail service with increased storage space shortly thereafter.

Initially, Gmail was only open to a select group of users. However, Google recently opened up Gmail accounts to US mobile phone users. If you don’t have a mobile phone, you can still open a Gmail account the old-fashioned way — find a friend who has a Gmail account and request an invitation.

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, Google presents Google Moon, a version of the Google Maps interface that plots the Apollo moon landing sites on a photo image of the moon.

You can zoom in and zoom out, but if you look too closely, you’ll discover that the moon is made of cheese. 😉

Google proudly displays the number of web pages contained within its index. At 8 billion pages and counting, this potentially represents an immense quantity of useful information. Indeed, Google is well suited for finding all sorts of arcane trivia tucked into the many recesses of the web.

However, web researchers already recognize that the quantity of data is only one factor. If the information you are searching for is not within one of the 8 billion pages in Google’s index, you’re out of luck.