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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Excellent 10 Google Tricks


10. FIND A BEAUTIFUL WALLPAPER FOR YOUR DESKTOP RESOLUTION WITH GOOGLE IMAGES


Here’s how you do it:

  1. Go to Advanced Image Search
  2. Next to “Exact size” click on “Use my desktop resolution”. Then, next to “Content types” select “Photo content.”
  3. Enter some words. If you want to find cows, enter beautiful cows :) Let’s see the results:

google found backgrounds 486x400

Notice that many of the images in the results are from wallpaper
sites. Google Images makes it very convenient to go through these types
of sites and browse them like a gallery instead of going to each
gallery site separately. Yes, I hear you say: Wow, I didn’t know Google could do this.

9. CREATE UNLIMITED DISPOSABLE EMAIL ADDRESSES WITH GMAIL


Take the following example:

gmail addresses 532x400

That’s right, you can add one or more dots ANYWHERE between your
username and send messages to that ‘new’ email. All of those messages
will arrive to your old (without dots) email. Hard to explain without a
picture. But somehow Google did find a way to do it…


Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address
that looks like yours but has a different number or arrangement of
periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think someone
else’s mail is being routed to your account, don’t worry: both of these
addresses are yours.

Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can
add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual
destination address; they’ll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In
short:

  • homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com
  • homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com
  • homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if
you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot
from it. You’ll still go to your account.

Yep, this is an explanation from Google itself. Now that you understand this, let’s keep going.

8. SEARCH VIDEOS DURATIONS USING GOOGLE VIDEO


I’ve noticed there’s not a single video site that allows you to
search videos by duration. Let’s say I want to learn Spanish and I want
comprehensive videos for that (longer than 20 minutes.) To search, I go
to Google Advanced Video Search page and select “Long” next to “Duration”. Here’s what happens:

google video duration 560x346

Now all that’s left is to get some free time and watch those…

7. WANT TO FIND AN IPAD ALTERNATIVE USING GOOGLE SEARCH?


Sure, you can write ‘iPad alternative’ in Google but that won’t give you the best results. Instead, try this:

better than google searchUsing “better than product” where product=any product will give you not only alternatives but better alternatives to a particular product. Very cool.

6. DETECT ANY UNKNOWN LANGUAGE WITH GOOGLE LANGUAGE DETECTOR


I have a big problem:

what language is this 560x99

What’s the solution? Google language detector.

google language detect

Another good way to detect and also translate is to use Google Translate and the “Detect Language” option:

google translate 560x228

5. SEE WHAT THE DUTCH HAVEN BEEN SEARCHING FOR RECENTLY USING GOOGLE INSIGHTS


Google is the most popular search engine in almost any country in the world. Google Insights
(like the name suggests) gives you ‘insights’ of what people have been
searching for around the world. For example, Netherlands:

google insights

Hyves is a Dutch portal and social network. Weer seems to be a weather portal.

4. WHEN DID GOOGLE BECOME MORE POPULAR THAN MICROSOFT? GOOGLE TRENDS HAS THE ANSWER


google trends 560x364

Google Trends
helps you discover the trends on various topics and see what people
have been searching for over time. In this case, you can see when
people started searching for Google more than Microsoft in early 2005.

3. HATE OPENING PDF FILES? GOOGLE DOCS IS THE SOLUTION


So you’ve been searching on Google for a particular topic and found a PDF file:

google pdf quick view 560x372

Instead of opening the file in Adobe Reader (which is a painful
process), you can click on “Quick View” and open the file in Google
Docs! It takes seconds to open and it’s way more flexible. If you
choose later, you can always save the file as PDF by choosing the
export option in Google Docs.

2. SCAN AND READ YOUR RSS FEEDS LIKE EMAIL MESSAGES IN GOOGLE READER


You probably know how easy it is to open and read
email messages in Gmail thanks to the list view. Well, you can do the
same in Google Reader:


google reader 560x310

The default view in Google Reader is ‘expanded’ which makes the
items pretty difficult to scan and read. If you change the view from
expanded to ‘list’, then it becomes WAY easier to SCAN items and pick
what you like.

1. GOOGLE CAN TELL YOU THE ANSWER TO LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE


googles answer to life 560x106

I wish it was so simple :)





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