As most of us who work on the web, my friendship with Google may vary depending on the day.

I was recently looking for tickets and hotel reservations, and decided to give the Google search tool a shot: Google Flights.

I have to confess that I am happy I did it. This tool allows us to check the prices of airline tickets from one destination to the next one, showing the results by price with information for alternative schedules, airlines, etc. It is possible to check the information for round trips, one way only, as well as to multiple destinations.

Once you finish selecting the route, schedule and airline, the tool allows you to go directly to the airline’s website to finish the transaction.

In addition, Google also has a tool that allows you to search for hotels: Google Hotel Finder, and I decided to try my luck once again. This tool lets you include the city where you want to do the search and the dates of your stay. It shows the results of the search with links to the hotel websites to complete the reservation. But in this case, the results include not only links to the hotels, but also to travel websites like hotels.com, bookings.com, etc. In my case, the use of this tool helped to save 40% in the hotel reservation!.

Google and I had a good day today.

I recently had the opportunity to observe my son decide which was the right video game he wanted to purchase with his own money. Below are some of the questions and thoughts that came to his mind.

1. How am I going to recuperate this money, once I spend it?

2. Should I try to sell one of my old video games? One that I do not enjoy playing anymore? How much would I get for it?

In the past, when the games he wanted where gifts, he would choose a game that he played at a friends house, games that he had seen on tv commercials, or even games he heard other kids talk about.

The difference this time was that he was going to get the game with his own money. After a visit to the store and finding out how expensive the games were when he buys them with his own money, and finding out how little money he would get from this old game, things did not look so great.

He decided he would have to get a less expensive game so he wouldn’t spend all his money at once. He still needed to choose the game. This time he asked me if he could go online and look at the games. We sat together at the computer and to my surprise he was looking at reviews and videos of the video games. It did not take him very long to choose the game he wanted. Of course he did not want to wait for the game to be shipped. We checked online to see which store carried his game and went there the following day. He decided he was going to sell an old video game, despite the fact that he was not getting much for it, so we wouldn’t have to spend more of his own money. To our surprise he got more money for his video game than what was offered to him at the first place he went.

I was amazed how the internet helped him make a decision that he was happy with.