10 Useful Google Tricks

Google is one of the most popular sites in the world and yet it could be even more valuable than most users even realize. If your Google searches are simply a string of words then you're just not getting the full affect of Google. There are many tricks that can be used with Google to make your search better and these are 10 of those tricks..

Conversions
Google can be a blessing for cooking skills. Conversions are always tough to remember and I've never found a chart with all the conversions I needed. With Google you can convert just about anything. "Quarter cup in teaspoons" will convert teaspoons to cups. "Seconds in a year" will convert time, "5 USD in Euro" will convert money and "155473 bytes in kilobytes" will convert bytes.

Document Type
Did you find a helpful PDF file but now can't find it? Searching by document type on Google could help. Type the search terms that you want to use followed by filetype:pdf to search for a PDF with those search terms. This works for all types of files.

Flight Status
Don't bother going all the way to the airport's website to find out the status of a flight. The flight status can be found even more quickly by doing a Google search for it.

Google Faces
Anyone that often does image searches on Google should learn the Google trick for finding pictures of faces. Sometimes when searching for a person an item comes up instead. If you want to eliminate the pictures of objects and only get results of faces then type the person's name and then &imgtype=face. Now when you search for "Pink" you'll only get pictures of the musician and not any random pink object.

Numerical Range
Recently I wrote an article about the football games between Alabama and Florida in the past 20 seasons. Instead of going through each year and searching for it year by year, you can simply search for Florida and Alabama football 1990...2010 and the results will bring up all search results that include those years.

Recommendations
I'm often looking for movie or music recommendations. Little did I know that one of the best websites for recommendations is Google. All it takes is a couple quotation marks and the right terms. By putting quotations around a phrase Google will search for the entire term. Want to know if there are any musicians similar to Justin Bieber? A search for "sounds like Justin Beiber" or "similar to Justin Beiber" will do the trick. Not happy with your iPod? Do a search for "better than iPod". Want to find a movie similar to the one you just saw? Search for "similar to Zombieland".

Related Terms
Ever searched for an item on Google but weren't sure what words to use for the search? Using the related terms search can help. Simply type a tilde (~) right in front of the searched term and the results will be for the search word and related terms.

Site Search
One of my pet peeves is when I'm on a website and find an article I like. Later I go back to that website but can't find the same article. That article can be found by doing a site search. Type in the search terms that you want followed by the word site, a colon, and the address for the website. For example, if I wanted to search for Jose Reyes on ESPN.com I'd type Jose Reyes site:espn.com

Spell Check
Not sure how to spell a word and you're not currently in Microsoft word where it will give you a correct spelling? Hop over to Google and type the word into Google. Nine times out of ten if the word is spelled incorrectly then Google will suggest the correct spelling. Also, if you're looking for the definition a word then don't bother with dictionary.com just go to Google and type define followed by the word.

Time
Have a loved one that is visiting on vacation in Sydney, Australia and you're not sure what time it is there? Simply do a Google search for "what time is it in Sydney, Australia"? Now you don't have to worry about accidentally waking them up at 2 in the morning.