Enhance Your Use of Google

Do you Google? If you do, have you thought about that question? Did you know that "Googling" has become so prominent in our culture it is listed in the dictionary now? Yet we rarely begin to tap the true power of this tool

Did you know that Google will give you the time anywhere in the world? Or that Google is a giant phone book? That Google will convert units of weight, distance, or money for you? Google can also check on flights, find the meaning of words, and the power of Google goes on and on indefinitely.

There is simply no way to even begin to easily describe the ways you can use this massive tool without almost becoming overwhelming in the process. As a result, I will take five things Google can do quickly, much quicker than you or I could, and describe how to use them.

TIME:
Let us do time first. This is almost to easy to do. There is no need to have multiple clocks to keep track of what time it is in which timezone, nor do you need to remember that your Aunt is six hours ahead, your Grandmother three hours behind, and the Girlfriend a day and a half ahead of you. As long as you know where they are, Google will do it for you in seconds.

Simply open Google, pick a location you want to know the time in, and enter it into the search box like this: time Melbourne.

Replace the city with the location you want to find the time in and hit the enter key. Voila! You now have an instant clock at your finger tips. Out of the twenty test I ran only one place could not be found, but a ton next door was. For multiple locations I received multiple times. You can refine your searches by adding more detail such as state or country. ie, time Burlington vs time Burlington, Vermont.

CURRENCY:

Google will also do handy conversions of money for us. If we want to know what that $100.00 we want to send our Aunt in Great Brittan will be worth when she gets it open Google and enter 100 USD in GBP into the search box. As of right now that $100.00 US dollars = 70.8867938 British pounds. Change the currencies and you get different numbers. Euro, Yen, Australian Dollars, play around and you will get the hang of it quickly.

DISTANCE:
This is one that we all had annoying conversion formulas we had to learn and use in school. While I do think we should understand how this formula work, once we know them we do not need to stop and scratch our heads trying to remember. Google will do them quite nicely for us. Simply enter 1 mile in km into the sear box and Google tells us that 1 mile is equal to 1.609344 kilometers. Change numbers and units like 1 ft in cm and we find that 1 foot is equal to 30.48 centimeters.

TEMPERATURE:
This is my favorite I think. I use this feature daily sometimes in my blog when recording the weather for a given day. All we do is open Google and enter 45F in C and we learn that 45 degrees Fahrenheit is the same as 7.22222222 degrees Celsius. Or you can swap them around. You can even get cute like this, type in 45f in kelvin and you will find that 45 degrees Fahrenheit equals 280.372222 kelvin.

SPELL CHECK AND DEFINITIONS:
this is another one I use quite a bit. We are all used to Google suggesting things when we make a typo. But do you realize that what is really happening is they are running a spell check on your query and then returning suggestions? You do not need to be searching to use this. All you do is open Google and type somthing into the search box and Google comes back asking Did you mean to search for: something.

But it gets better. Type define:something into the search box and you get a bunch of results with the definition o f the word "something". As with any of our previous results, change the text you input into the Google search box and you will find different results.

There are a great many other tricks hidden, and not so hidden in the Google interface. Get out there and let me know if you find some of your own, and Happy Googling!