Let’s face it. Not all search results give us the information we want. Many times the pages in the results don’t meet with our standards. Google helps us out with this by putting sites that are rated in directory.google.com. This is very much like what Yahoo used to have on their home page.
Most blogs don’t show up in search engine results. This can be annoying because sometimes blogs can have some great content, whether it be for entertainment, research or news. In the past, in order to find a blog you would have had to stumble on it during your web surfing, or someone would tell you about it. Now you can search the blogs by visiting blogsearch.google.com.
You can also get movie information on Google. If you enter ’showtimes’, you will be asked to enter your zip code and Google will give you the time and place that movies are showing locally. To read reviews of a movie enter, “film:<name of the movie>” or “movie:<name of the movie>”. Cast lists of movies can be seen by typing, “castlist:” and then the name of the movie. You can even search by director of a movie by typing, “director:” and then the name of the movie.
You can get music reviews of an artist, album, song or band by typing, “music:” and then the name of song, etc.
Didn’t you hate it when you were young and asked someone how to spell something and they would say, “look it up” (in the dictionary). The argument was how could you look it up if you didn’t know how to spell it in the first place. Google helps us out with the ‘define’ command. Type, “define:<word>”. One of the great things about this command is that if you misspell the word Google will suggest the correct spelling.
Google is also a calculator. Just type in your equation and hit the search button. It can even handle complicated equations. Perhaps you have a recipe or project that is using a measurement system that you have to convert to your standard of measurement. Well, Google understands plain English, so all you have to do is type, “5 liters in gallons” in the search box and Google will give you the conversion. “86 f to c” is how you would enter a temperature conversion and you can convert currency by entering something similar to “150 euros in dollars”. Enter “2009 in roman numerals” and check out the result.
If you are not using iGoogle, run don’t walk to iGoogle.com. You may need to open an account but it is free and worth a lot more than that. iGoogle has great gadgets that have been created by other users. There are tens of thousands of different gadgets on everything from getting weather, news and stock information that is updated constantly in you iGoogle page, but you can get cool gadgets to play games, become more productive or just about everything else under the sun. Not only is there a great gadget that you will love, there are many gadgets that you will love. Much time can be lost just by looking through all of the available gadgets with more being added daily.
