Sponsored Links

Yeah, the number is quite praiseworthy. Many of us love Google for various reasons. But what if I give you an aggregated view of all these reasons? This post is all about the various incredible features for what the whole world loves Google.

1. I’m Feeling Lucky:

Ever wondered why this button is coupled with the Google Search button ? Well, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button takes you directly to the first web page Google returned for your query. You will not see the other search results at all. An “I’m Feeling Lucky” search means you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them.

As an example, to directly jump to the homepage for Harvard University, simply enter Harvard into the search field and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Google takes you directly to “www.harvard.edu”, the official homepage of Harvard University.

2. Google’s Local Search

Google enables you to search the entire web for just those stores and businesses in a specific neighborhood. Include a city or zip code in your search and Google displays relevant results from that region on a map with links to reviews, directions, and more information at the top of your search results.

As an example to search for restaurants with pizza availability in your city type into the search box “Pizza your city or ZIP code”. For my city I tried type “Pizza 143001″.

As you see the top result is of Live Search. Also you’ll get results of pizza stores across your city.

3. Movie Search

In order to find reviews and showtimes for latest movies playing near your hood, type “movies”, “showtimes” or the name of a current film into the Google search box. For this to work be sure to save your location by using Google Local. To change your location go to local.google.com.

When I typed “Movies” in Google search box, I got the above result. This is probably because I have saved Amritsar as my location in my profile at local.google.com

4. The Google Phonebook

You’ll see publicly listed phone numbers and addresses at the top of results pages for searches that contain specific kinds of keywords. But you’ll see results only for US streets and phone numbers of US residents only.

To find listings for a US residence, type any of the following combinations into the Google search box:

• first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
• first name (or first initial), last name, state
• first name (or first initial), last name, area code
• first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
• phone number, including area code
• last name, city, state
• last name, zip code

5. Search By Number

For gathering information about tracking ID’s for parcels, patents and other specialized numbers, just enter these numbers into Google’s search box. For example, typing a FedEx tracking number will return the latest information on your package. Other specialized numbers search by number types include :

• UPS tracking numbers.
• FedEx tracking number.
• USPS tracking number.
• Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers.
• UPS codes.
• Patent numbers.

Remember to put the word “patent” before your patent number.

6. Street Maps

Use Google homepage search to find street maps, enter your street name including zip code or city/ state (e.g. 112,Berkeley,University of California,CA), in the Google search box. Generally, the street address and city name will be enough. Below is the result returned with this query.

NOTE: You can find only US streets with this feature. To use Google for locating any street, use Google Maps.

7. Travel Information

To know about timings and other information at a particular airport, type the three letter code of airport followed by the word “airport.” For example, San Francisco International Airport updates can be found by searching for “sfo airport.” Also to check the status of any particular flight, type the name of the airline followed by the flight number.For example:

The above query returned the following result:

8. Weather

To see weather forecast of your town directly from Google homepage just try type “Weather  your town name” into search box. I tried it for my hometown:

9. Cached Links

When Google crawls the web, it takes a snapshot of each page examined and caches the pages as a back-up in case the original page is moved or deleted. When the Cached link is clicked, you see the web page as it looked when Google indexed it.

A cached page is displayed with a header( as shown below ) at the top which serves as a distinguisher between the recent and cached version of the page. Terms that match your query are highlighted on the cached version to make it easier for you to see why your page is relevant.That means the case when the website you liked once upon a time is currently missing from the web, even then you can have a glimpse of it.

All the search results do not have the Cached Link.The reason behind this is that either that page of the site have not been indexed by Google for certain reasons or the site owners have requested Google not to cache their content.

10. Google Homepage as a Scientific Calculator

We have posted about this feature in our earlier post. With this feature you can perform simple to complex arithmetic calclations, units of measure and conversions, and physical constants. To achieve this simply enter the values of query you’d like to perform into the search box and hit the Enter key.

Beware of cheating Google Calculator, if you try to try any invalid arithmetic expression to G calculator then it won’t return a result. Example, 1/0 is invalid arithmetic expression, so Google calculator returns no arithmetic result.

11. Currency Converter

Google’s built in currency converter can perform almost any currency conversion. Just type amount and currency types which you need to convert. For example I tried to convert US $100 into INDIAN RUPEE, so i typed this into search box:

12. Search for particular file types

If you prefer to see a particular set of results with a specific file type (for example, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box along with your search term(s).

Since a long time, Google has expanded the number of non-HTML file types searched to 12 file formats. In addition to PDF documents, Google now searches Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 etc.. The new file types appear in Google search results whenever they match user query.

13. Search results from Google Groups

Sometimes search result page has has results from Google Groups. These are messages that users have posted to a discussion group about a topic related to your search. These search results from Google Groups are of great help in providing useful and human answers to their queries.

14. Direct Link Save into Google Notebook

The search results we see have a Note This link with them as shown:

Whenever we click on this link a Notebook window appears as shown:

After filling up the description( optional), the link is saved into our Google Notebook account which we can access at a later stage. This is more advanced feature than bookmarking web links.

15. Results Prefetching

There are certain search results on which Google automatically instructs your browser to start downloading the top search result before you click on it. When you click on top result, the page will open faster than normal pages. Though this feature is very useful, but it skips some of the conversation between browser and server so if you don’t want this to happen you can disable this feature( Only for Mozilla Firefox)

• Type about:config in your browser location bar.
• Search for the setting “network.prefetch-next” and set the value to false.

Also, this feature can result in unnecessary cookies saved in your browser’s cache as prefetching saves cookies from that top result automatically into browser’s cache even when you don’t click on that top search result.

16. The URL link search

Whenever you search for this kinda query, link:some domain, then Google shows you the web pages that link to that domain. For example, link:www.google.com will show you pages that point to Google’s home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search.

17. Search within search results

We have posted earlier on this feature. Google provides users the ability to search within search results of popular websites like Youtube.

If you know of any more similar useful features about google, let us know in comments below.

Enjoyed reading this article? Subscribe to our full RSS Feed for more tips like these.