Google wants to give you a tip

Seems like you can't toss two cents without hitting someone who wants to give you advice about surviving this unprecedented economy, this harsh financial landscape, this stock market that gives me stress headaches. I just didn't think that one of those someones would be Google. You know, Google? The company with the chef? The incredible California tech perks? The over $91 billion dollar market cap?

Yeah, THAT Google. And who knew they were so frugal? The company has launched Google Tip Jar, a site designed to let people provide and access tips for saving money. It's available at http://www.google.com/tipjar.

In addition to being a place to share money-saving ideas, the site is also a showcase for Google technology called Google Moderator, which you can learn more about at http://moderator.appspot.com/. Basically Google Moderator lets users submit questions/suggestions which other users can vote up or down. The idea is that the questions/suggestions with the most value to the community will rise to the top thanks to the voting.

When you first look at Tip Jar you'll see that it looks rather like GMail, with a sparse design, topics for tips on the left (finance, health, tech, shopping, etc.) and the tips themselves on the right. I took a look at the At Work section and found myself browsing 147 tips that had been voted on over 3500 times. There were many tips that revolved around bringing your lunch to work (while you can flag "inappropriate" tips, I didn't see any way to flag very similar or duplicate tips) but also other suggestions like taking advantage of matching 401K contributions, implementing "work from home" options, and even using Flickr photos with appropriate Creative Commons licenses instead of using stock photography.

Anybody can read the tips, but to vote on the tips you'll have to log in (with a Google Account.) The Tip Jar keeps track of the tips you've voted on, and will even present you with a "slide show" of tips if you want to do a lot of voting.

Of course, this wouldn't be a REAL Google application unless you could search as well. And you can search all 3100+ tips by keyword. I searched for "cat" and got six results, from the interesting ("Use old drinking water from your dog, cat, etc. to water plants") to the informative ("If you have rescued a dog or cat from the humane society, you save 10% and do not have to pay sales taxes in their pet supply store for the life of you pet. So a bag of dog food can save about $5 a month, due to their non profit status.") to the controversial ("Instead of a dog or cat, consider keeping a pet such as a rabbit or duck that can be eaten. These animals make excellent companions in times of prosperity, but also provide sustenance when food is needed.")

I was kind of surprised about what wasn't here -- for example, I couldn't find an RSS feed to keep track of new tips -- but I had fun browsing around and getting some new ideas about saving money. Here's a bonus tip for using the Tip Jar: pay attention to who's submitting high-ranking tips. I learned about some finance/economy Web sites I hadn't heard of before.