Given that both of my parents know about Google, it's ubiquity as the finest search engine is incontestable. It's fairly to obvious anyone that has used Google that it has a spell check for your search terms, offers translation for many languages, caches its search pages (so you can see stuff as it was when Google trawled it, kind of like The Wayback Machine at times), and it will search for similar sites to the results it kicks back (Google ranks results according to how often other people link to them, so being able to search for similar pages can be neat-o when the page rank doesn't quite give you what you want.).
But did you know that Google does other neat stuff too? If you click the underlined search term in the blue bar at the top of the results page, you'll be taken to a definition of the terms you search. If you type in a mathematical equation in the search field (even if its a browser toolbar and not www.google.com) using parentheses and +-*/ for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division respectively, it will calculate for you?
Typing in an address (city and street typically suffice) will get you a map, whereas a name or phone number will kick back phone book info. You can limit the google search to particular sites by suffixing your search with site:www.the-domain-you-want-to-limit-the-search-to.com. Try link:www.domain.com to see what sites are linking to you. (FYI, our beloved gusalmighty is only linked to by 3 sites, whereas that hack over at suckful has 6 pages of linkage. Let's fix that by spamming gusalmighty to Wallace and back!) Google will also give you stock quotes if you run a search on the ticker tag.
There is other neat stuff behind the scenes in the Google Labs and of course, their neat history of special logos.
Google, so much more than just a search engine.
Posted by Nutrimentia at September 3, 2003 08:03 PM | TrackBack