Another 'Casual' Week at Google - Writely Released, Search Innovations Continue

This is my first ever test of Writely - I actually wrote this post and published it using this new online word processor Google's latest project that is likely to seriously hurt its competitors (MSFT Word et al). Seemed a little slow in loading a new page; otherwise, looks very clean - no major delay on the typing. Is this AJAX I'm using? Oh but wow, check out the ease of publishing websites. I saw Writely as a threat to Word - but now it appears to be also a threat to Dreamweaver - and such an easy 'snap-on' to things like Blogger.

And even more crazy...Check out the links that Google has recently placed in it's golden zone of Internet real estate (Below, Left). I took the screenshot on Aug 19, 06 - although this advancement is not yet live on all computers. Look at the 'Try your search on all of our competitors' section. You can see the results from your search on all the other main engines and bloglines. Pretty sweet.

Right there at the top of its search results - the most valuable place on the page, Google has links to whom? None but every one of it's fiercest competitors - in order from most threatening to least. Know any other companies that help you find their competitors more efficiently?

I suppose Google didn't want to just roll out one more innovation to its search interface - so it looks like they've also rolled out a 'search suggestions' component. Notice (Below, Right) how it offers numerous other suggested search terms - when i typed in 'dogs', it automatically drops down the most popular terms people search for when looking for 'dog', as well as the number of results for that term in its index. Quite useful, if you ask me.