Saturday, December 01, 2012
Harish Bhatt
Google Search is an effective tool that can help you with instant search results. As an Internet user, you may not be fully aware of Google tips and tricks that make your searches fast and better. Sometimes you may find your searches cluttered with irrelevant information. But with little practice and the tips below, you will learn how to search smart and get the information you were looking for.
1. Get the local time anywhere
You may have friends and family members who live around the globe and if you are interested to know the time in that particular place, all you have to do is type “time in” and press the enter key. You will get the results instantly. In the same way, you can get the information of weather or population of a particular country. Go-ahead and explore your local city and see how fast it works.
2. Conversions and calculations
Although we were taught of metric conversions during school, we may not always remember the exact formulae. Google’s effective built-in converter-calculator can help you out of such troublesome calculations. You just have to enter the 2 units and you get the desired conversion. Same applies for calculating the number of bytes in kilobytes, seconds in a year and so on.
Google search also does a great job with basic calculations like addition, subtraction, square root, etc. You just have to use the function names to perform such calculations.
3. Definitions
Google search eliminates the use of a hardcopy of dictionary. If you need to quickly look up the definition for a word or phrase, use the syntax define: word and hit enter, you get the definition for the given word.
4. Narrow Search to Specific words and Websites
If you enclose any word or phrase with double quotes, only those websites are displayed which have the given word or phrase in their content. Same applies when you are searching for the lyrics of a particular song and you have forgotten its title. Just enter some words from the song and you will automatically get the remaining in the search results.
Incase you have forgotten the title of an article you want to retrieve from a particular website, all you need to do is to preface the search term with site:
5. Find a Term in URL
This trick is helpful in cases where you want to know about a topic based on a particular date. For instance, you would like to see the results for Best Cars of 2012. Just type “inurl: 2012” Best cars and the results for the best cars for that year are displayed.
6. Phone listing
Let’s say some unknown person calls you on your mobile number and you want to identify the person, you can do so from Google using its phonebook feature. But you’ll have to use an existing number to trace out the call.
Hope you will enjoy these interesting Google tricks to make your searches more effective and time saving.
