Friday, November 26, 2010

10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google

Google is amazing (please thank me for this amazing revelation). There are some things you
probably didn’t know Google can do. Take your time and read the information below. You’ll
likely learn a few tips and tricks that will make you appreciate Google even more.

10. Find a beautiful wallpaper for your desktop resolution with Google images

Here’s how you do it:
  1. Go to Advanced Image Search
  2. Next to “Exact size” click on “Use my desktop resolution”. Then, next to “Content types”
  3. select “Photo content.”
  4. Enter some words. If you want to find cows, enter beautiful cows icon smile Let’s see the results:
google found backgrounds 486x400
Notice that many of the images in the results are from wallpaper sites. Google Images
makes it very convenient to go through these types of sites and browse them like a
gallery instead of going to each gallery site separately.

9. Create unlimited disposable email addresses with Gmail

Take the following example:
gmail addresses 532x400
That’s right, you can add one or more dots ANYWHERE between your username and
send messages to that ‘new’ email. All of those messages will arrive to your old (without dots)
email. Hard to explain without a picture. But somehow Google did find a way to do it…
Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address that looks like yours but has a
different number or arrangement of periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think
someone else’s mail is being routed to your account, don’t worry: both of these addresses are yours.
Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the
dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they’ll all go to
your inbox, and only yours. In short:
All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your
username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You’ll still go to your account.
Yep, this is an explanation from Google itself. Now that you understand this, let’s keep going.

8. Search videos durations using Google Video

I’ve noticed there’s not a single video site that allows you to search videos by duration.
Let’s say I want to learn Spanish and I want comprehensive videos for that (longer than 20 minutes.)
To search, I go to Google Advanced Video Search page and select “Long” next to “Duration”.
Here’s what happens:
google video duration 560x346
Now all that’s left is to get some free time and watch those…

7. Want to find an iPad alternative using Google Search?

Sure, you can write ‘iPad alternative’ in Google but that won’t give you the best results. Instead,
try this:
better than google search
Using “better than product” where product=any product will give you not
alternatives but better alternatives to a particular product. Very cool.

6. Detect any unknown language with Google Language Detector

I have a big problem:
what language is this 560x99
What’s the solution? Google language detector.
google language detect
Another good way to detect and also translate is to use Google Translate and the “Detect Language” option:
google translate 560x228

5. See what the Dutch haven been searching for recently using Google Insights

Google is the most popular search engine in almost any country in the world. Google Insights
(like the name suggests) gives you ‘insights’ of what people have been searching for around
the world. For example, Netherlands:
google insights
Hyves is a Dutch portal and social network. Weer seems to be a weather portal.

4. When did Google become more popular than Microsoft? Google Trends has the answer

google trends 560x364
Google Trends helps you discover the trends on various topics and see what people have
been searching for over time. In this case, you can see when people started searching for
Google more than Microsoft in early 2005.

3. Hate opening PDF files? Google Docs is the solution

So you’ve been searching on Google for a particular topic and found a PDF file:
google pdf quick view 560x372
Instead of opening the file in Adobe Reader (which is a painful process), you can

click on “Quick View” and open the file in Google Docs! It takes seconds to open
and it’s way more flexible. If you choose later, you can always save the file as PDF
by choosing the export option in Google Docs.

2. Scan and Read your RSS feeds like email messages in Google Reader

You probably know how easy it is to open and read email messages in Gmail thanks
to the list view. Well, you can do the same in Google Reader:
google reader 560x310
The default view in Google Reader is ‘expanded’ which makes the items pretty
difficult to scan and read. If you change the view from expanded to ‘list’, then it
becomes WAY easier to SCAN items and pick what you like.

1. Google can tell you the answer to life and the universe

googles answer to life 560x106
I wish it was so simple icon smile

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