Google tricks that change the way you live

Despite being the big evil corporation that knows too much about us and ferrets out our searches, Google is also involved in several great projects that improve our day-to-day lives. No, I'm not talking about being able to use the company's search engine to find almost anything that exists on the Surface Web, but about a bunch of other little things are more useful than we may realize. Here are some neat Google tricks that change the way we live.

Let's begin with Google Sites, which was completely rebuilt and is now easier to use than ever. For those of you who don't know, Google Sites is a free service that allows everyone to create, edit and share websites. One of the biggest recent changes was the addition of collaboration capabilities; these work just like in Google Docs allowing different people to work together on the same site simultaneously. Additionally, Google Sites now plays together really well with the other Google services, which means that you can effortlessly embed videos from Google Drive, Google Maps directions, Google Calendar notes and more directly into your website. Lastly, now it's also very easy to create sites that scale well on every kind of screen.

Moving towards something that improves our lives outside the virtual world, Google has become really helpful when it comes to time management. As most of you have probably discovered, whenever you searched for a business on Google or on Google Maps, you could see its working hours. Well, the IT giant has recently made things even better by showing you how busy a location is in real-time , now the opportunity to find places where you won't have to wait in line for hours can be a big advantage. However, Google didn't stop there and took things one step further: from now on, you will also see detailed information such as business hours for each separate department in a business. Lastly, if you're expecting guests, you can use Google to find out how long it will take them to get from their place to yours so that you know when everything should be ready.

OK, we've been serious for enough of this article, so let's just have a bit of fun with another project that Google is currently working on. Quick Draw is a pretty cool web-app that is designed to teach an AI to quickly recognize the objects depicted in doodles. The fun part is that you can play a little game: just go to the Quick Draw page and you'll be asked to draw specific objects in 20 seconds or less and the machine will try to guess what you're doodling (like Pictionary). I should warn you that it's super addictive and you may be stomped from time to time when you're asked to draw The Great Wall of China or Mona Lisa. However, it will also give you a deeper understanding into how neural networks "think" and identify objects or letters.