It’s been an eventful week for Google indeed, be it a lost court battle or launching YouTube AdWords or now the launch of much awaited storage service.  All the reasons for this Search Engine major to be in news and for us to report them.

On Tuesday (yesterday), the Mountain View based company unveiled its much awaited online storage service called the Google Drive. 

The Drive, which starts with 5 GB of free storage, is available to anyone with a Google account, including Google Apps for business accounts.

Google Drive is Google’s reply to other well-established cloud storage systems such as Dropbox, Box, etc.

The official webpage explains the features and usage of this cloud storage system; here it is for a better understanding of the Google’s new product.

Features:

1. Access everywhere.

Google Drive is everywhere you are – on the web, in your home, at the office and on the go. So wherever you are, your stuff is just...there. Ready to go, ready to share. Get started with 5 GB free.

2. Google Drive is available for:

PC and Mac, iPhone and iPad (coming soon) and Android devices

3. Store your files in a safe place.

Things happen. Your phone goes for a swim. Your laptop takes an infinite snooze. No matter what happens to your devices, your files are safely stored in Google Drive.

4. Go beyond storage. Collaborate.

Google Drive lets you do more than just store your files. Share files with exactly who you want and edit them together, from any device. Google Drive gives you instant access to Google Docs, a suite of editing tools that makes working together better – even when your teammates are miles away.

5. Get 5 GB for free.

Get started with 5 GB of free space. Upgrade to 25 GB for less than $2.50 a month and you can store practically everything for next to nothing.

Usage:

a. Create & collaborate.

In Google Drive, you can create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations instantly. Work together at the same time on the same doc and see changes as they appear.

b. Work better with the products you use everyday.

Gmail -Say goodbye to bulky email attachments. Send a link from Google Drive in Gmail and everyone has the same file, same version – automatically.

Google+ -Your videos and pictures in Google Drive are instantly available in Google+, so you’re never more than one click away from sharing with your circles.

c. Powerful search.

Google Drive helps you get to your files faster. Search for content by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Google Drive can even recognise objects in your images and text in scanned documents.

d. View anything.

Open over 30 file types in your browser—including HD video, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—even if you don’t have the programme installed on your computer.

e. Google Drive with your favourite apps.

Create, open and share files from a variety of apps directly in Google Drive.

f. Share the way you want.

You can share files or folders with anyone, and choose whether they can view, edit or comment on your stuff.

g. Start a discussion.

Create and reply to comments to get feedback and make files more collaborative.

h. Go back in time.

Google Drive tracks every change that you make—so when you hit the save button, a new revision is saved. You can look back as far as 30 days automatically or choose a revision to save forever.

According to a fan post on YouTube, There are plenty of reasons to go for Google over other competitors when it comes to Google Drive. Mainly due to following reasons-

1. Low price,at least for that server speed (and capacity)

2. Server locations - In comparison to (some) others, Google is all over the world.

3. Google is a huge company, nothing is going to happen to your files, and IF it should, Google would make you happy, or they would have hundreds of thousands of people against them.

4. What's the deal about information? Google already know 90% about you?

The new Google product is definitely calling applauses from everywhere but, privacy is something that concerns few.

If we need to explain the terms and policies in a nutshell, the terms state that:

Your Content in our Services. Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

The terms are worth the concerns right? But the fact remains that Google already knows so much about each one of us that giving in to this another useful proposition would not be a problem for some or rather a large number of people would want to try this product out.

Here is good luck for team Google from us, they actually don’t need it!