Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, here’s a list of obscure google tricks u might not know...
1>> Convertions
Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether
you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how
many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how
many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros
there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro). For the geekier set, bits in
kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19
in binary) are also pretty useful.
2>> Local Times
Enter simply what time is it to get the local time in big cities around
the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like what time is
it hong kong to get the local time there.
3>> Track Flights
Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get
back the arrival and departure times right inside Google’s search
results.
4>> Compare items with “better than” and find similar items with “reminds me of”
Results 1 – 100 of about 550 English pages for ” better than WinAmp”.
Results 1 – 57 of 57 English pages for ” better than mIRC”.
Results 1 – 100 of about 17,500 English pages for ” better than Digg”. (Wow. Poor Digg.)
The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to
whatever it is you’re searching for. Using the same concept, you can use
this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, ” reminds me
of _someband_” or “sounds like _someband_” will pull up artists people
have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a
great way to find good, no-name musicians you’d probably never know of
otherwise.
Examples:
Results 1 – 88 of 88 English pages for ” reminds me of Metallica”.
Results 1 – 36 of 36 English pages for ” similar to Garden State”.
Results 1 – 66 of 66 English pages for ” sounds like The Shins”.
5>> Google as a Proxy
Use Google’s cache to take a peek even when the originating site’s being blocked, with cache:example.com.
6>> Find related terms and documents
Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling "~nutrition" without inverted coma returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.
7>> Find music and comic books
Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music
files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into
your personal Napster. Go ahead, try this search for Nirvana tracks:
-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent
directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”. (Sub out Nirvana for
the band you’re interested in; use this one in conjunction with number 7
to find new music, too.) The same type of search recipe can find comic
books as well.
8>> ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search
Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word.
Don’t know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named “Priti”
who you’re emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you
forgot what “corazon” is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or
type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term’s
about.
9>> Google recognizes faces
If you’re doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don’t want any of
the French city, a special URL parameter in Google’s Image search will
do the trick. Add "&imgtype=face" to the end of your image search
without inverted comas to just get images of faces, without any
inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many
photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.
10>> Remove affiliate links from product searches
When you’re sick of seeing duplicate product search results from the
likes of eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, clear ‘em out by
stacking up the -site:ebay.com -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com
operator. Alternately.
Happy Googling Friends..
