When you are in Germany...

You get this, in plain text when you type www.google.com:

We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead.

If you're traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

And here is a screenshot. Notice the difference?

Bowled by Google!

A couple of days back I was in this talk by a Google executive. I could not resist asking him the question which I had in mind for a long time - how does Google show the "cached" pages. I could never think that Google actually stores all those webpages in their server - but that's what they do. Think about it - that is effectively backing up the entire web!

Thought of the day

A popular advertisement line says -
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard.
Let me tweak it a bit. And I come up with -
There are somethings you need money for. For everything else, there's Google.