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Google Labs and more - part one

Saga Magazine technology columnist Jonathan Margolis recommends these useful websites to help you on your way

Back up website

Backing up the contents of your computer is the boring-but-important chore that almost no-one does. And then they get upset when a software or hardware meltdown (or, indeed, a burglary) means they lose all their documents, letters, emails, photos and music. For the truly paranoid, online backup is the thing – where all your stuff is safely stored on computers on the other side of the world. There are, however, some quite dodgy (or just plain incompetent) companies advertising backup services on the Internet. Many are based in the States and run out of someone’s garage. Thanks then to a nice British company, www.backupdirect.net, which is my pick of the backup sites. Their basic product costs £10 a month for backing up daily and storing 500Mb of data. Simple, reliable and recommended.

Google Labs

Google is probably the most innovative company on the internet, reknowned for paying bright young things just to sit around having ideas. Google Labs' http://labs.google.com, is where they play and test out prototype ideas. At any one time you’ll find, for instance, detailed maps of Mars, experimental ways of ordering taxis and checking where they are, and a wonderful Web ‘gadget’ called Google Sets, which brainstorms for you by matching a given word with a set of similar words – not quite synonyms, but just words related to the first in some way.

Medical website

There’s no question that the internet has armed the ordinary citizen with a great deal of medical information – which is why so many doctors hate it so passionately. The problem is that so many medical websites have a hidden agenda – to sell you some product or other. Which is why the site of NICE, the NHS’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (see www.publichealth.nice.org.uk) is so refreshing. It’s serious and strictly non-patronising, but packed with information on drugs and medicines.

This article was created: 27 November 2006.
This article was last edited: 20 March 2007.

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