More Google Search Tips

A search for “What is the who” is going to summon results about the English rock band. Search instead for “What is a who” and you see top results around the whimsical characters in Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who!”
Word order - Leave common terms in the correct order. Typing “blue sky” yields very different results from “sky blue.”
It is better to ask, “What is the average length of an octopus” rather than “Is the average length of an octopus 21 inches" You may see search results confirming 21 inches, but maybe other sources are wrong. When you include the answer in a search query, you bias results, which may not be correct.

Add a minus sign to that same search along with the thing you want to eliminate from your results. So you might type “kitchen remodeling -stainless” to leave out stainless steel. Or “kitchen remodeling -stainless -granite” to eliminate both stainless and granite. Add a space before the -.

If you are searching for a specific quote, but one of the words slips your mind, put an asterisk in its place, such as "Four score and * years ago."         

More Google Facts

If an employee of Google dies, the company mandates that the employees’ spouse receives half the former employees’ salary for the next ten years as well as stock benefits. If the employee has any children, they will each receive $1,000 per month until they turn 19.

In addition to street view cars, images have also been captured by attaching a camera to individual people, a tricycle, and even a camel. The camel cam was attached to a ten year old dromedary named Raffia, who captured images across the Liwa desert in the United Arab Emirates.

Google Factoid

If you type “google in 1998” into Google search bar, it will take you to what the site looked like the year it was created. Google originally only included text results. This changed in 2000, when the top search result on Google was of Jennifer Lopez in an exotic green Versace dress at the 42nd Grammy Awards. Soon after, Google created Google Images to search criteria. By 2010, more than ten billion images were indexed to the search engine.

Google Personal Activity

Do you want to see what personal information about you Google keeps. Go here LINK and you will find out. You can also change your personal and security settings.

Internet Growth

The number of Google indexed pages has grown from 1 trillion to 30 trillion during the last 7 years.

The number of net additional pages indexed by Google each year is also increasing. There were 3 trillion additional pages added during 2010, 5 trillion during 2012, and 8 trillion during 2014.

Google Energy Use

In 2011, Google's data centers reportedly used 0.01% of the world's electricity, even though it uses low-power servers and high-efficiency data centers. Its networks use 900,000 servers across the world to power the search engine and other services. It uses artificial intelligence to monitor and make best use of electricity.

Google Birthday

Next week September 5, 2015, Google will celebrate its 17th birthday. Seems like the company has been around much longer. It is worth about US $367Billion. In such a few short years, it has profoundly changed the internet and the world. How appropriate to celebrate a birthday on International Bacon Day - Both are ubiquitous.

Google Births and Obits

Google has an interesting forum that show notable births and deaths for any given day. Short and sweet, with no pictures, but you can click to get more details. LINK

Google Ocean View

If you think Google street view is cool, you will love street view/ocean. I like to use street view to see what a house, or building, or block looks like, so when I drive there I know what to look for.

Now we can do the same under the sea. Thinking of going somewhere warm to do some snorkeling? Try ocean view to see what types of fish you might encounter or take a tour of sunken ships. Street view/ocean has wonderful photography and all the features of street view, plus video. Caution, the views can be addicting. LINK

Eight Useful Google Tips

Are you trying to remember the name of a song you heard? Try typing, winner takes it* abba and Google will try to complete your search.

You can search by file type by typing filetype:ppt or filetype:excel or any other file type.

Putting two periods, .. between two numbers will search within that range, such as news 2013..2015

If you are looking for a definition type, define: followed by the word you want defined.

Here is a very useful thing google can do for you. Set a timer by typing, set timer for and then the amount of time, as in, set timer for 10 minutes.

In a restaurant and need to figure out tip, type in, tip calculator and Google will present an onscreen calculator for you. You set amount, tip percent and it does the work for you.

If you want listen to some music, type in, music by Cher or any other artist and add youtube at the end.

You can do the same for books, type in, books by and the author name, (of course I had to test this by typing in my own name).

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, which the San Francisco-based nonprofit has done since 1996, two years before Google was founded.

It is also called the Wayback Machine and indexes over 435 billion webpages dating back to 1996. It is the largest archive of the web. The archive also hosts:

• Books. One of the world’s largest open collections of digitized books, over 6 million public domain books, and an open library catalog.
• Videos. 1.9 million videos, including classic TV, 1,300 vintage home movies, and 4,000 public-domain feature films.
• The Prelinger Archives. Over 6,000 ephemeral films, including vintage advertising, educational and industrial footage.
• Audio. 2.3 million audio recordings, including over 74,000 radio broadcasts, 13,000 78rpm records, and 1.7 million Creative Commons-licensed audio recordings.
• Live music. Over 137,000 concert recordings, nearly 10,000 from the Grateful Dead alone.
• Audiobooks. Over 10,000 audiobooks from LibriVox and more.
• TV News. 668,000 news broadcasts with full-text search.
• Scanning services. Free and open access to scan complete print collections in 33 scanning centers, with 1,500 books scanned daily.
• Software. The largest collection of historical software in the world.

Internet Time

This is what happens every sixty seconds on the internet.
2,635,217 Google searches
204,709,030 emails sent
1,865 new mobile web users
51,763 app downloads
847 new websites created
200,743 people watching porn
$238,651 is spent on web shopping
$89,300 revenues from products sold on Amazon
778,520,485 Gb of global data transferred
1,875,734 new Facebook likes
159,745 new photos uploaded on Facebook
243,040 new tweets
104 hours of video uploaded on YouTube
2,780,653 YouTube video views
About a million Google searches happened while you were reading this tidbit.

Junk Phone Calls

When you receive an unwanted phone call, you might want to look up the number by using Google or other search engine. For regular numbers, you will see a list of services promising to find a person, but for scams you will usually see a few sites like those below.

You can help others by going to web sites like http://www.mycallbot.com http://misternumber.com or 800notes.com  www.callercomplaints.com The sites will show you what others have to say about calls from a number and you can add your add details of the call. You will also want to add the number to your do not call list.

More Google Tips

Google has 12 billion searches per month. Many people try too hard and become frustrated. Using a few tricks makes it much easier to quickly find what you want. For all of these tips, do not type the quote marks.

This is very useful for finding one thing, while eliminating something related - to find a sunbird that is not a car, type "sunbird -car" and Google will eliminate car references or try "beatle -beatles" to get bug info and eliminate the singing group.

Type in a holiday name and it will give you the day and date for the current year.

Put ".." between two numbers and Google will search within that range, as “camera $200..$300” to show cameras within that price range.

To find a definition, type "define:" followed by the word.

If you do not remember a complete headline, book title, song title, etc., fill in the blanks of any search with asterisks (*) and Google will try to complete your search for you.

Search for "Books by" and the name of an author, Google will display all of their works.

If you hit "I'm feeling lucky" without actually typing anything into the search box, you will get a catalog of all the Google doodles.

Google Tools

Google has a handy feature that allows you to set up a countdown timer. Type in set timer x minutes or hours and it will show a countdown clock. You can continue to surf and an alarm will sound when the time has expired. Handy if you want to limit your activities to a fixed time.

Type "google.com sky" without the quotes, to look around the sky the same way you look at a map of the earth. It shows objects in the sky, such as stars, constellations, planets, the Earth's moon, and galaxies.

Google Search Tip

Google's site-specific search; the search company's results are often better than many big operations. This works great on everything from media sites to retail outlets. Just include "site:www.example.com" (replacing example.com with actual site name) along with your search term to get results just from that site.

Google Compare

Here is another great feature of Google that might help improve your health and decrease your waistline. Google has a nutrition comparison feature that allows you to compare two types of food for nutritional values.

If you want to compare the calories, nutrients, and other values of apples and oranges, type in "compare apples oranges" without the quotes. You will see photos and a chart revealing calories, sodium, vitamins, minerals, etc. It also lists other normal results, like web sites, etc. I also tried "compare banana potato" and found there is only twelve calories difference between them. Very interesting and useful tool.

Google Site Search

Did you know that Google has a feature that allows you to search a specific site for information. Here is how it works: To search a single website -
1. Type "site:" into the Google search bar (without the quote marks).
2. Type the name of the website you want to search without the "http://" and the "www."
3. Type the search term you are looking for.
For example, use Google to search my blog for peanuts, you would type this - site:shubsthoughts.blogspot.com peanuts

Google Flight Info

Enter your airline name, flight number, and city of departure or arrival (separated by commas) into the Google search box and it will give you current information, including gate information. As mentioned in another post, you can enter your shipment number into the search box for status of your package from UPS and Fedex.  I love this.

Google Package Track

Here is a Google feature that may come in handy around the holidays. Track your packages by entering any tracking number into Google search and it will show you where your mail is. No need to login to USPS or FedEx.