A Complete Guide to Google Special Search – How to Use Google A Lot More Creatively

Soumen Halder — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:00:10 +0000

Google is no doubt the most popular search engine till date. Millions of people across the globe use it everyday to search for content, pictures, blogs and everything else. The reason of the huge popularity of Google is because the results are so relevant and match closely with what the user is searching for.

Apart from regular search queries, do you know that you can use the Google search engine in a variety of creative ways? You can use Google to know the sunrise and sunset timings, convert currency amounts, perform local searches, find movie show times and so on. These type of Google search, better known as Google special search requires the user to type a specific query and add an attribute to the query.

A very good example of a special Google search is knowing the time of a particular city. I live in India and want to know what time is it in London, UK. To perform this Google special search, I will have to type the exact query as “What time is it” and supply the parameter as “London”

What’s interesting to note is that these Google searches depend upon your geographic location (in some occasions) and the results are displayed accordingly.

In this article, we look into some special Google searches which can be used in a more creative way to know important things you have always wanted:

Know the Weather of a Any City Using Google

To know the weather conditions of any city, go to Google.com and enter the name of the city in the search box. Then type the state and the country of the city, as shown in the following example:

Not only will Google display the current average temperature of your city, but you can also see the weather pattern for the last week. Additional details like humidity and wind speed are also shown in the same page and you can add the result to your iGoogle home page using the link “Add to iGoogle”.

Know the Time of Any City Using Google

Similarly you can also know the present time of any part of the world using a simple Google search. Just type time in the Google search box followed by the name of the city or country as shown in the following example:

Use Google as a Calculator

You can perform simple arithmetical calculations from Google search. This includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root and power. To perform the calculation, type the complete arithmetical expression in Google search and you will get the end result as shown below:

Use Google as a Currency Converter

Often I would want to know what how much money I have in my Paypal account. Since funds in Paypal are represented in U.S Dollars, I use Google for converting the currencies to Indian Rupees.

To use Google as a currency converter, type the amount followed by the source currency name in the Google search box. Then type in followed by the name of the destination currency. Thus, if I want to convert 237 USD to Indian rupees – I would perform the following Google search:

Use Google to Know the Time of Sunrise and Sunset in your City

This one is one of my favorites. You can use Google to know the exact time of sunrise and sunset in any city of the globe. Simply type Sunrise and then enter the name of your city. The sunrise and sunset timings will be displayed right under the search box, as shown below:

Use Google to Know Public Data of Various Countries

Google can be used to know the trends for population and unemployment rates of any country of the world. Type population or unemployment followed by the country name and the results will be shown as in this image:

The data is shown from World bank’s database, you can click through the thumbnail to view more information regarding the population growth and unemployment stats of the particular country. The resulting page will contain public data of all the countries of the world, just select the corresponding checkbox from the left sidebar as shown below:

Use Google For Local Searches

Not many people know that Google is a great tool to find local stores, restaurants, shops and other business entities in your city. Say you are looking for a good restaurant that serves “thai food”. Go to Google.com and type thai food followed by the name of the city where you want to find the local business listings.

Google will show a map on top of the search results, pointing you to all the restaurants who serve the type of food you are looking for.

In the same way you can search for book stores, dentists, grocery store and other local business listings of any city.

Use Google to Find Movie Showtimes

If you are a movie addict and want to know the movie timings of theaters in your city, Google can help. Just type movies in the Google search box and enter the name of your city in the “Find Movie Showtimes” search box. Then hit “Get Showtimes” and Google will display the movie timings of popular theaters in your city, as shown below:

These are just a few ways you can use Google for performing special searches. You can visit this page to know more about Google special searches.

What’s your favorite Google special search trick? Let us know your ideas through a comment.

A Complete Guide to Google Special Search – How to Use Google A Lot More Creatively originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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6 Google Sites You May Not Know About

Trevor Dobrygoski — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:34:25 +0000

By now you may have guessed I’m a big fan of Google. Not because they are the biggest kid on the playground, but because they have an awesome approach to what they do. They see people needing something and they solve the problem for free. How can you not succeed when you give people what they want for free?

Many are in their Labs stage of development. A lot of the sites you have grown to love have been in Google Labs at some point. Google Maps, Reader, Docs and Alerts are just a few. Here are a few cool sites you may not be aware Google has in the lab.

Trends

Trends is a very handy research and comparison tool. Typing something like [VW, Ford, Fiat] into the search bar results in graphs, location of searches and related news displayed. By comparing multiple search terms simultaneously, time is saved importing the data into spreadsheets or a graph. All of the information is right at your finger tips.

I have also used Trends when quickly comparing keywords (although much better tools are available) to get a general idea for the popularity of the search term.

Specialized Search

To help narrow your search, Google offers specialized search engines for different topics. An example might be if you are looking for Linux how-to information. You could go to the Linux search and type in your search term there. This will filter out all of the Windows server information, in-turn cutting down on the amount of sites you might have to look through.

The current specialized searches are: Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, US Government and University Search lets you to search to a specific school website for things like enrollment info or course schedules.

News Timeline

Search a date in the past to find out what happened. The advanced search allows different criteria to be set up such as a specific newspaper, magazine, blog or baseball scores.

While using Google News Timeline, I did come across some issues. One problem is the magazine or newspaper must have a digital version available in Google’s Book Search or the News Archive. This may be a little bit of a snag if you are trying to do an in depth search for something.

Google Moderator

Moderator is a really simple idea. Create a “series” and invite general public to ask questions, give tips, make suggestions or just about any thing else you can think of. It is kind of a mashup of a forum and crowd-sourcing. Your audience will ask questions, then the same people will vote on the question letting you know how many people agree or disagree with what was asked. With some creativity, this could be a great proving ground for products, ideas or services.

Fast Flip

A quick way to scan through different news sources at the same time. The news feeds can be narrowed by a topic, source, most viewed and several other options. Fast Flip shows a small screenshot of the page usually just big enough to see the major headlines. When you spot something, just click on it to make the page large enough to read. If you could customize the sites and save your choices, it would be pretty cool RSS reader.

City Tours

Offers a variety of attractions mapped out using Google Maps. Directions, approximate time to see the attraction, walking times to the next destination, ratings and hours of operation. It pretty much takes the guess work out of planning a touristy trip.

What kind of app or site would you like to see Google make next?

6 Google Sites You May Not Know About originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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