The bad…well, having been spoiled by the Mozilla community I have Firefox running exactly as I’d like. I have addons that prompt me about the validity of certian sites, little gadgets that alert me when my mail has come in, a plugin to drag and drop photos into my flickr account, and it’s all within Firefox. Chrome is…well, it’s just an out of the box browser which I’d take over most other options but it has a way to go.

Number 2: 1 Trillion URLs indexed
Now that is an impressive milestone. 1 Trillion URLs. No that’s great copy, and looks brilliant splattered all over the web, but don’t confuse legitimate web pages for URLs. 1 trillian urls does not equal 1 trillian legitimate web pages. Think about it, most blogs have the same page reachable via a number of urls, canonicalization means essentially every domain is reachable via 2 URLs unless the owner is hip to .htaccess, and don’t even get me started on search queries each with a unique URL or session ids each with a unique URL.

But alas, it still is a tremendous step forward and Google should be congratulated.

Number 3: SearchWiki (which I’ve blogged about before)
Allowing us to essentially customize and influence the search rankings was the next logical step in personalization. How far Google will take this and how much influence this will have in terms of optimization only time will tell.

Number 4: FIGHTA!
Yes, having your own multi-billion dollar company pays off.

Apparently 2 Gulfstream Vs, a 757 and 767 Boeing jets simply wasn’t enough so the gents got themselves a Dornier Alpha Jet. Impressive no?

Combine this with the landing priveledges Google has at the NASA facility that sits adjacent to the Google campus and you’ve got yourself a number 4 spot on my list.

Number 5: Flash no longer a death sentence
Rounding out the list is Google’s ability to index Adobe Flash content. Historically this has not been the case, they were unable to read text, extract links, really it treated flash as the ugly step-sister of the web.

But all that has changed, or so we are being told. Adobe has created and released to Google what they are calling ‘Flash Reader Technology’ which allows Google to read text, extract links, in short all the things Google could not do before.

Sounds brilliant right? The kind of thing that shoud top ANY list of 2008 Google accomplishments but alas there are huge issues with the technology. First off, being treated like the ugly step-sisters they were Flash developers never bothered with SEO techniques. Things like unique URLs and an easily indexed structure for the Flash application have never been utilized so while they may now be able to rank it will be nearly impossible to do that highly with such terrible on-page optimization. But it doesn’t stop there, the reader has a number of flaws – even something as simple as mistaking coding as content.

No the Flash reader has a long way to go but it has the potential to be the big ticket item for Google in 2009.