One of the things our teams here at Page One spend a lot of time doing is writing, editing, and tweaking website copy. In the normal course of our day, we find the need for the occasional dictionary or thesaurus or word counter, amongst other things. Since a good part of what we do revolves around search engines and around Google in particular, we naturally reach out to the big G to serve as all of the above (and more) on a regular basis. I don’t suppose that most non search obsessed folks might be aware that Google actually serves many functions beyond the one that made it famous. I’m going to go ahead and go through a few of the ones that I use on a regular basis:
1) Dictionary. Type into your search box the word “definition” (without quotes) followed by the term you would like the definition of.
2) World Clock. Type into your search box the phrase “what time is it” (without quote) followed by the name of a city and voila- you have a world clock at your disposal.
3) Metric and Currency Converter. I use this one all the time. Simply type into your search box the conversion you wish to make (no quotes). “5,000 US Dollars in Euros”, or “50 lbs. in Kilograms”.
4) Track Your Flight Status. Again, pretty simple. Enter your Airline and flight number into your search box and you’ve got it.
5) Make Google Recognize Faces. This is a Google Image search, and a bit more complex, but still cool. You have to make an addition in the actual url of the search. Let’s use the name “Rose” as an example. Search for images of “Rose”. You will get a bunch of flowers. Now, go to the end of the url in the address bar and add &imgtype=face (at the end). Hit refresh. Now it only returns faces.
6) Identify an object or phrase even if you don’t know what it looks like. This is what Google Images is all about. Say you’re reading a book about the jungle and you don’t know what an ocelot looks like. Type ” image ocelot” into your Google search bar (no quotes), and there you have it! This also works great for foreign language terms which you may not remember or not known in the first place.
As always, feel free to email me at chris@pageonewebsolutions.com with questions or for a free webinar to talk about all things internet.
