Baris Gultekin, the engineer who developed Google Now, a sort of "personal assistant" for users, imagines a future in which mobile phones "will work" for us and will give us useful information without having to ask for it.

"We call today's phones smart, but in reality they are not. They don't do things for you. They have to be constantly told what they have to do," Gultekin said in an interview with Efe news agency at Google headquarters in California.

According to Gultekin, Google Now "can change the future".

"We are in the beginning stage of something that can be phenomenal," the engineer said.

Considered as a rival to Siri, an application by Apple for the iOS operating system which responds to the questions of users and gives recommendations, Google Now is focussed on helping in the management of daily tasks, as well as offering travel information and leisure activities such as sports and movies.

"We started this project in parallel with another engineer," Gultekin said, adding that Google Now feeds on other Google services, like "gmail" and "maps", and offers information based on the context of the person using it, for which the physical location of the user can be key.

"We can give a traffic update for your everyday travel to work... or the weather forecast just when you wake up," said the engineer, who believes that the technology should help make people's life easier and not stand in their way when not needed.

"Or, if you are planning a trip and want to remember the time of your flight, the information will be provided without even asking, when you land, or heading to a hotel, the same thing. You will not need to search your 'gmail' for the reservation number," he added.

Gultekin believes that the evolution of Google search has made the emergence of Google Now possible.

The search started offering a series of links to websites related to a series of words and took a step forward by adding images and videos to the web pages.

The third big step came with what Google called the "knowledge graph" which offers structured and detailed information about a topic, and also, links to other sites.

The objective is that users utilise that information to solve their problems without having to navigate to other places for the information needed.

"What knowledge graph does is understand different things and the relation between them" and helps finding answers quickly, Gultekin said.

For the engineer, Google Now is the next step in that evolution, offering answers even before one looks for them.

If the service knows that only a few hours are left for a flight, it will share the trip information with the user by itself, or if it knows that the phone owner has a meeting at a certain time and there is a problem with public transport, it will recommend a new route.

While aficionados concentrate on writing the eulogy for Orkut, one of the most popular social networking websites just a few years ago, its owner Google has gone ahead and removed it from the Internet. The URL www.orkut.com now redirects to Google's home page.

The search engine's first foray into social networking was with the introduction of Orkut more than 10 years ago. The service was named after its creator, also a Google employee, Orkut Buyukkokten. On June 30, Google had announced that it would be shutting down Orkut, once widely popular in India and Brazil, for good on September 30.

In a blog post, Google had said, "Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell."

Up until yesterday, users of the late social networking website could export their photos on the website to Google+, incidentally Google's current attempt at riding the social media bubble. Moreover, users could also download Orkut profile, scraps, testimonials, community posts and also photos to their computer of choice via Google Takeout. In case you haven't done that yet, you are mostly out of luck now.

Interestingly, both Orkut and Facebook were started in 2004. While Facebook is still widely popular, Orkut started losing its mojo a few years ago. Google tried its hand at social networking once again with Buzz, which tanked gloriously. Now, Google's only hope is Google+.

If you want to revisit your long ignored Orkut profile, now is the best time to do so. Google is going to shut down its Orkut social network on September 30, as it had announced earlier. Orkut was the search giant's first foray into the social networking space, which failed to take off due to tough competition from rival services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google later launched another social network called Google+, which may not be giving sleepless nights to Facebook, but turned out to be far more popular than Orkut. While Orkut wasn't a big success across the world, it was very popular in India and Brazil.

In a blog post, Google had said, "Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell."

If you want to save the data you have on Orkut, we've written a complete guide on how to download your Orkut scraps, testimonials, and photos.

Google had said that it would save an archive of all Orkut communities after it shuts down the service on September 30. The company had asked people to remove their Orkut account from Google permanently if they didn't want their name or posts to be included in the community archive.

Both Orkut and Facebook were launched in 2004. While Facebook has become the world's largest social network with over 1.2 billion users, a Reuters report said Google declined to comment on the number of users Orkut has.

Orkut's fortunes floundered a few years ago and it is finally being closed.