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: Carolina Blawg

Google Tips

By Steven Melamut

1. Find related terms and documents
Ok, this one's direct from any straight-up advanced search operator cheat sheet, but it's still one of the lesser-used tricks in the book. Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.

2. Compare items with "better than" and find similar items with "reminds me of"
Reader Adam taps the wisdom of the crowds by searching for like items using key phrases. He writes in: Simply search for, in quotes: "better than _keyword_"

Some example results:
Results 1 - 100 of about 550 English pages for " better than WinAmp".
Results 1 - 57 of 57 English pages for " better than mIRC".

Results 1 - 100 of about 17,500 English pages for " better than Digg". (Wow. Poor Digg.)

The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you're searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, " reminds me of _someband_" or "sounds like _someband_" will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good, no-name musicians you'd probably never know of otherwise.

Examples:
Results 1 - 88 of 88 English pages for " reminds me of Metallica".
Results 1 - 36 of 36 English pages for " similar to Garden State".
Results 1 - 66 of 66 English pages for " sounds like The Shins".

Just get creative and you'll, without a doubt, find cool new stuff you probably never knew existed.

3. Track flight status
Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google's search results.

4. Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more
Google's powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you're cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.

from Brandi Dawn Tuttle at Duke University Medical Center Library

Full post as published by Carolina Blawg on January 22, 2008 (boomark / email).