Google Tips: Enhance Your Use of the Search Master

As I promised, I have a few more Google tricks up my sleeve for you. We have already talked about various calculations and conversions you can preform with the built in Google Calculator, the way Google will look up times, definitions, and even perform basic spell checks for you, bet Google goes much farther.

WEATHER:
The first of the five Google tricks today is weather. Just as Google is your on-demand world clock, so Google can tell you the weather in just about any location you can think of. Open Google and type the following into your search box weather burlington vt.

You now know what the weather is in my corner of the world. I have tested this with a number of obscure locations, both in the United States and abroad. The Google weather system had little trouble finding most everything I fed it until I began entering obscure Russian and Chinese towns. It did find every major location I entered so start checking on friends and family. Is the sun really shinning? Or are the just giving you a hard time about your winter weather?

STOCK QUOTES:
Google will provide you with the latest Stock Quotes of any company you are interested in. A very useful feature in these uncertain economic times. To see the current market data for any given company or fund, type their ticker symbol into the search box like this MSFT and you will see how Microsoft is doing in the markets.

The system did not want to look up stocks on non-American markets, though if you are using a localized version, say UK Google, this may change. You can also get your favorite Index stats through the system by typing INDEXDJX:.DJI as one example. And if you want a Google Market statistic from a particular source, the NASDAQ for Microsoft as one example: NASDAQ:MSFT.

SPORTS SCORES:
This is another useful Google search you can do for quick results. It appears to only work for American Sports Teams, but that could be my lack of knowledge regarding sports in general. Even if it is only American Clubs, Google will provide the latest score for a team whose season in current. In other words, this Google query does not work if football is not in season.

In the Google search box, type Boston Celtics to get the score of their last game. Another example would be Boston Bruins. If you find a way to get Google to tell you the score of a non-American sport using this search please let me know. Knowledge is power my friends.

EARTHQUAKES:
This is another fun one - though it may lack day-to-day relevance unless you have a scientific interests of some kind. Open Google and type earthquake Los Angeles into your search box. Your results will give you the most recent quakes in the are of your Googled city along with their magnitude.

Entering a city not in a known quake zone like earthquake Burlington does not get you much. You can also enter a zip code in the Google search box like earthquake 98110 which will tell you about earthquakes in the Seattle area.

While Google's detail is best at getting results in the states, you can get worldwide earthquake information. Open Google and enter earthquake in the search box and you will see the most recent quakes from around the world along with their magnitudes.

ZIP CODES:
This on is not actually documented anywhere that I could find; perhaps because they use it as an included piece of so many Google searches. I tested it thoroughly with United States addresses, but because not all countries use Zip or Post Codes it begins to break down for other countries. There is an interesting article on postal codes at Wikipedia if you want more information on the history of postal codes.

Open Google and enter the zip code you are interested in into the Google search box and your results should get you a map with a state name. If your entered code serves an area like 05743 you see a map to the Fair Haven Vermont area, if your entered code is more specific like 01938 you will see the town of Ipswich Mass.

I was able to get some Canadian addresses as well as London to work, but not flawlessly. Play with it, it you find a trick I have not yet I would love to know about it. Until next time Friends.