It's About Time!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/holiday-goodies-from-picasa-web-albums_14.html

Holy cow, Google added a search function to their web albums. Yeah that's right. Added a search function!! My question is, how in the heck did they go so long without it?!? I believe it's been nearly a year since web albums came into existence and they came out of beta a couple of months ago...all without a search function. Even their own "new features" page touts the new search capability with the comment of "Hey, we're Google." EXACTLY! All the more reason search should've been the first thing you thought about. Sure it's a free service, but so is flickr and they've had search and tagging since their conception (as far as I know). Plus I'm pretty sure Flickr allows more than 250 mb of storage for their basic service. C'mon Google, if you can have an increasing mailbox size for all Gmail users (nearing 3 gbs) I know you can afford to stretch out the picasa limit a bit. I don't need 3 gb (yet), but 1 would certainly seem reasonable.

By the way, a good portion of my photos from this year can be on the aforementioned Picasa web albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/brianpsmith81. Feel free to try the search function out :-) Or order prints (another "new feature"). Don't expect to see many from next year though (unless Google finds a little more generosity)... my capacity has nearly been reached.