Google Tips Off Topic..

[Theduck Profile]

1. Different Types of Files at your will
How many times would you have asked for materials (PDF, PPT, DOC) for a particular topic from a friend? Its almost everyday that we might have the necessity to ask them either for knowledge, preparing a presentation, white-paper or for case studies. Such times it mostly difficult to look out what to exactly search for because most of the times you don’t know about the topic at hand. But this petty keyword unleashes its lethal power at such occasions.

Let’s say I want to implement a case study on SOA which means I have to read a lot of information for SOA. So I just have to find materials which might have already been uploaded on the web in the form of PDF’s, DOC’s or PPT’s. These materials can be easily obtained by doing a search for:

PDF - service oriented architecture filetype:pdf
PPT - service oriented architecture filetype:ppt
DOC - service oriented architecture filetype:doc
2. Scholarly Search
If you want some authenticity of the materials then it would be better to find the materials from educational institutes or universities. For this use the Google scholar search. But suppose you don’t like to switch to Google scholar search you can add the same query with an additional parameter to the normal Google search box,

service oriented architecture filetype:pdf site:edu
3. Meanings of any word in an instant
Now you do not have to carry a dictionary or install a dictionary software just for the purpose of finding out a meaning of a word. With the wealth of information in Google’s hands, its a piece of cake to find out the meaning of the word. Just use the define: keyword. The meaning would of course be displayed but also a set of other links which might have an alternative definition are also given out with the link to read more about it.

define:beureaucracy
You would argue here that, a dicitionary gives out more information than this. But what about words that don’t actually fall within the vocabulary. Suppose you want to know what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is then you would have no choice. Google Search comes to your rescue in this case,

Abbreviations - define: SOA
Jargons - define: Web 2.0
SMS language - define: LOL
4. Find the time of any location
Many of us might be probably working for client which are based at different locations. And communication has to be carried out frequently carried out in such cases. But before a communication you have to know which time zone the location is falling into otherwise you would be causing a disturbance.

I have seen people installing time zone software for showing the time of the location they would be calling to. But with Google at your hands you don’t have to install any software. It would be just simple to use a query for finding the current time such as,

time new york
psst….look closely the time on the little clock graphic. It also shows the perfect time!

5. Weather at your fingertips
I had been to GOA for a Christmas vacation in the last week of December. But I made a mistake of not finding out the temperature of GOA before leaving. Had I known that it is hot even in the winter I would not have made the mistake of carrying additional luggage consisting of blankets and jackets.

If you are thinking to visit a place it is useful to know what the temperature of the place is before hand, it can make efficient packing. Google helps you here too. Just use this query without asking anybody or waiting for the news to make a weather report. I wish I had thought of this!

goa weather
6. Google does live commentary too!
Indians are cricket fanatics. But its amusing to see the organizations here trying to put together tactics to devoid cricket lovers from wasting time to watch the cricket scores instead of doing their work. What I think they fail to understand is that by blocking the live cricket scoring sites they are actually making the employees more curios and provoking them to hunt for proxy networks or listen to the radio or chat with their friends elsewhere.

Jokes apart, you actually don’t need proxy networks to view the live cricket scores if you at least have access to Google. If you want to find the latest info about all the cricket matches then just type,

cricket
But if you want to find out only about a particular match then use only the names of the two playing nations,

India Australia
Remember that the scorecard will come only when the play is going on.

7. Calculate with your browser
Every OS has a calculator inbuilt but when the browser is the thing which is constantly open whey bother to open up a calculator. Open Google and straight away type your mathematical expression. You can go all the way from basic arithmetic to trigonometrical expressions. This is simply amazing stuff accomplished by Google.

26 * 9000
sin(90) / cos (90)
8. Compare your currency with others
Now that the dollar is declining, the rest of the world must be busy trying to check the impact of the dollar on their currencies. But first of all one must know how much a particular currency amounts to when cashed in another currency. Google’s inbuilt currency converter just does this.

1 USD in INR
1 EUR in INR
9. Keep track of the stocks
With the booming stock market it is very important to track the stocks on a day to day basis. Putting a stock ticker in the search box is the most obvious thing you would think of. But it is not always you would remember the stock ticker, you should add the keyword “stocks:” to the company name.

The best part of the obtained result is that it provides a chart which shows the trend in the company’s stock along with important statistics.

stocks: INFY
Note: Currently the results are restricted to the companies listed in the US stock markets.

10. Wanna find some faces?
This is most interesting trick. You might be needing images for various occasions and searching for images is the most difficult thing because what we expect might not be possibly mapped to a query. But Google has a parameter in place for images in situations we need an image which describes a face.

Suppose I search for the term “happy” then the Google results page displays smileys. But I would like to use images of happy people. Even if I choose the term as “happy face” the results don’t show images which contain people. For this there is a parameter “imgtype” which you can use with the URL. For this put in the URL as follows:
http://images.google.co.in/images?q=happy&imgtype=face

Timeline Search

If you want to search the chronology of certain events then you can add the attribute “view:timeline” to your query following a space. For example, you can find the timeline invention of television which dates back to the 20’s when John Logie Baird had invented it. I found out that the first laptop came about in the 80’s which was GRiD Compass. It’s strange that I could not find computer.
You can click on the timeline to find out the details of the searched query pertaining to that period. Its a nice useful feature which helps you learn more.

1. Movie Reviews

Google provides a meta parameter “movie” for finding details of movies. For example, if you want to search for the details of the movie “The Matrix” then you would have to use,

movie: The Matrix

2. Discover Movies

If you are left pale from you routine and want to catch up with the new releases then instead of reaching out for the different movie sites just go to,

http://www.google.com/movies
This will of course give out the American movies. But what if you like to watch movies from your country. Of course, Google must have done something about it! And it does this, in the form of a simple domain change in the URL. For example if you want to find out Indian movies then change the domain in the URL to .co.in Here you go,

http://www.google.co.in/movies
If this page appears blank to you then it is because of the requirement of the city name you want to see the movie in. If you are from US, just enter the zip code. This is the fantastic feature of the Google Movie search. Enter the city name in the box and watch the results. The results will show you all the theaters of the city with the list of movies which are currently being aired.

3. Movie Details

Let’s say that at this instance, you are feeling about watching any romantic movie. The first thing you would do is either ask your friend about a recommendation or walk into a shop to ask which movies are worth watching. You would not need to do this with Google Movie Search in place. All you need is to know what you are looking for. So your keywords in this case would be “romantic movies” . If you want recent ones just sort them by date.

romantic movies
As with our earlier trick of changing domain, for searching movie by country, you would be short of luck over here. Because the results always would display english movies regardless of the domain of search. But hey, I have a trick for that too. Just a little change in the query,

romantic hindi movies
romantic indian movies
action hindi movies
4. Movie Anatomy

Sometimes it happens so, that you remember a movie but fail to remember the cast of it, even who was the director of it. Google can help you quick fix these thoughts without much waste of time. You don’t have to open any website nor find the specific keywords if you don’t know whom you are searching for. For instance try this,

director: The Incredibles
director: Gladiator
The first line highlighted in bold spells out the directly the required answer. Fantastic, isn’t it? Similarly you can find about the entire cast of the film by just doing something similar to this,

cast: The Incredibles
cast: Gladiator

5. Trailers

Finally after you have done a hard work of finding the movie details, you would not want to suppress your excitement to go and actually watch the movie. If you cannot wait for long then why not add something more to it. And that is, watching the trailers!

For finding a trailer, you don’t have to visit the official movie website nor search the video sites. Just use the keywords “youtube” and “trailer” with the movie title in between. For example,

youtube “The Matrix” trailer
youtube “Gladiator” trailer
youtube “The Incredibles” trailer

Bonus Tip: Apart from the fantastic five searches just one more bonus tip to get to the official site of any movie. Just use the keyword site besides the movie name. Examples are:

“Resident Evil” site
“Finding Nemo” site
“The Matrix” site

1. Most common trick - Using Quotes

To circumvent the above analogy lets try one of the most common trick, using “” (quotes) around this phrase, since using them restricts the results to include all the above 3 words and match the articles which have them. Try it:

“Oracle BEA acquisition”
This time the results look good since all the returned results have the 3 words either in content or their titles. But you still cannot say that the links would have some content surrounding the story. The reason is, if you consider this article itself, the 3 words are mentioned right here above. This means that even this article might get displayed in the results simply because I have used all the 3 words with the exact sequence. But there is no story about the acquisition. Get it?

2. Power of All - Using the operator allintitle

The time has come for using the powerful Google operator allintitle: This operator is used in a situation as above. Now considering the above situation, one would be urged to click on any article which has the 3 words in the title, the reason being articles with such titles are bound to be related exactly to what the title mentions. This is meaning of being definitive. The operator makes it a point to help you search the articles on the web which have the 3 words in their title. Try it:

allintitle:Oracle BEA acquisition
3. Power of One - Using the operator intitle

Similar to the allintitle you also can use just intitle which searches for articles which have either “Oracle” or “BEA” or “Acquisition” in their content and not all the three in the title. It is good for single word searches which come in title. Let’s say that you just wanted to find some articles which mentioned all the acquisitions made by Oracle but you are not sure of them. The trick would be to use:

intitle:Oracle acquisition
3. Digging deeper - Using the operator inURL

This one is my favorite trick. I am always looking out for current topics. The web on the other hand has got overloaded with redundant information. The problem lies here. If I search for something I won’t be so sure whether the links in the results are recent or old. Blogs help me the most is using this trick to my advantage. If you are frequent visitor of blogs then you might have noticed that they have the date of publishing right there in the URL. If you notice this blog too then the URL will have the date. Are you thinking what I am thinking?

If you have not understood then lets take the same above example. If you take the 1st example then you would notice that the search results also include old articles. In this case it also lists out BEA’s denial of Oracle merger in 2007. What we are interested is not this, but the news of the acquisition in 2008! So to try out a simple hack to this is to use the inURL operator. Try this:

“Oracle BEA acquisition” inurl:2008
The usage of inurl:2008 lists out only those links which have been published in 2008, thus furthering making your search definitive.

4. The Perfect Match - Using the operator allinurl

This is the most definitive of all the combinations which I have mentioned above and the most efficient too. But it may not always work because having multiple words all together in an URL is rare. But still if we try this in our example:

allinurl:Oracle BEA acquisition 2008
This is a huge filtering operator. You can judge it by the results themselves. It gives only a handful of results! Isn’t that brilliant? However, with this operator you cannot judge the quality of the returned results since it all depends on the URL is framed and not on the content! But many a times, I find it exact and helpful. Remember, you don’t have to put slashes (/) in here, just the words which you think might appear in the URL.

5. Look who is spying - Using the operator site

I use this operator sometimes for my amusement. With this operator you can search for keywords only from particular sites. For example:

Oracle BEA acquisition site:techtracer.com
will search for the articles in this site only! It isn’t helpful much since many sites have inbuilt search feature, including Techtracer. But you can use it for finding comments which you might have made in some site! Sounds like fun!

I remember I had made a comment in DailySeoBlog a few days ago. But hey, I don’t remember which article I had made the comment on. So here is my hack for using the site operator. Just type which name you had entered while commenting. I had used my first name “nitin”. So check this out:

nitin site:dailyseoblog.com

The Swirling Thumbnails of Google Images

Today, I found this really cool trick to impress your friends with. All you have to do is go to Google Images and do a search on anything you want. Now, delete the URL in the address bar and copy/paste the following code in:

javascript:R= 0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images ; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math. sin(R*x1+ i*x2+x3)* x4+x5; DIS.top=Math. cos(R*y1+ i*y2+y3)* y4+y5}R++ }setInterval('A()',5); void(0)

Sorry if bit extensive.
Just another thing attempting to help members.

[Lowsix Profile]

That is a super topic and a kickass post.
there was tons of stuff im not sure id heard of before.

thanks,

[Lucidlemondrop Profile]

For real.

Duck makes those posts full of interesting stuff that you just have to bookmark for reference!

[Theduck Profile]

Mini-bump

[Theduck Profile]

Why thank you, never used one of these smiley's before but here goes..

[Drextin Profile]

I can say with almost 100% certainty that I will never use any of those tips because I am too lazy or I'll forget about them. Does not take away from the fact they are all very good.

good job duck

[Lucidlemondrop Profile]

Why thank you, never used one of these smiley's before but here goes..

Ah, shucks!

[Realorfake Profile]

text the name of any business and their town ie "Marriot Hotel" Fort Lauderdale to

"Googl" or 46645.....NOT "google"

Instant address and telephone number...

free

[Rizze Profile Website]

1


The Swirling Thumbnails of Google Images

Today, I found this really cool trick to impress your friends with. All you have to do is go to Google Images and do a search on anything you want. Now, delete the URL in the address bar and copy/paste the following code in:

javascript:R= 0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images ; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math. sin(R*x1+ i*x2+x3)* x4+x5; DIS.top=Math. cos(R*y1+ i*y2+y3)* y4+y5}R++ }setInterval('A()',5); void(0)

Sorry if bit extensive.
Just another thing attempting to help members.

That was cool just tried it..... images flying around the browser.

Now can you get me any mp3 search ?
If not that's o.k.

It's all in the index files.. all of them.

[Realorfake Profile]

Get the 411 with 46645
10/07/2004 08:46:00 AM
SMS stands for Short Message Service, and Europe and Asia have thoroughly embraced this text messaging technology. Using your phone to send and receive text messages is a newer phenomenon in the U.S. Now we're getting into the fray with Google SMS. It's a way to access Google for precise information from your mobile phone or handheld device (like a BlackBerry).

Google SMS is a handy way to, say, get a listing for a nearby restaurant, find the definition of a word, or look up the price of a product, an area code or Zip code. You can even use Google SMS to calculate a tip. If your phone is enabled for text messages, just send your query to this 5-digit US shortcode: 46645 (GOOGL on most phones). Your query results are sent as text messages, not links. Learn more about using Google SMS on our help page or by sending a text message with the word 'help' to 46645.