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Favorite Hidden Google Features?
fredtheshingle asks: "Google now seems to allow you the option to track your FedEx and UPS shipments! Search using the tracking number for either carrier and a page that offers to track the package appears. Simply follow that link and the carrier's current status report is displayed. Nice! So what's your favorite hidden Google feature?"
A list of some of the google features available:t ml
http://www.google.com/help/features.h
It's amazing how helpful the "~" can be when doing searches. Prefixing a word with a tilde will search for that word and many of its synonyms. Very helpful when doing things like:
/. a while ago.
linux ~tutorial
Also, I think this list of google tricks was listed on
Yeah, but that means letting them use cookies. No thanks
I, too, prefer not to let Google set cookies. So far Google has been -- so far as I know -- a good respecter of privacy, but their insistence on recording all searches, along with the requesting IP address, gives me serious pause.
It's not that Google is evil, but that reposing that much information in any hands is a temptation to evil -- either on Google's part, or on the part of whomever ends up controlling it when and if Google goes public, or on the part of whatever government can issue subpoenas, or whatever lawyer can get subpoenas issued.
I'd feel much more comfortable if Google would purge its records of searches, or at least remove the IP addresses, but I suppose they have their reasons. I'll let you guess what those reasons might be.
Imagine Microsoft subpoenaing Google for the IP of whomever searched for "leaked Microsoft source" and then using that to allege an open source project is built on top of proprietary Microsoft code.
This is why I won't use the Google toolbar, and why for especially sensitive searches, e.g., "STD symptom" or "John Ashcroft calico cat", I go through an anonymizing proxy.
But while the easiest and permanent way to set image search SafeSearch off is through a cookie, I believe it can also be set per individual search using a check box that is sent to Google in the http GET as a parameter, bypassing cookies.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
And don't forget Google Labs for a taste of things to come.
Here's what I use. If you use Mozilla, make a bookmark out of the following (fix the spaces Slashdot inserted):Give the bookmark a keyword such as "gis". Now, when you type "gis foo" into the address bar, it goes to this URL, replacing the "%s" in the URL with "foo".
[Those other parameters are language, input encoding, and output encoding, respectively.]
Liberty in your lifetime
Google also allows you to do a lookup on a UPC code.. (it actually uses the database from www.upcdatabase.com)
works great if you have one of those modified cue cats
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Time is on my side
I found out that google offers a wireless search engine. Just go to that URL with your mobile, enter your search query and google will convert any site it returns to WAP format that your mobile can handle.
Here is a page that lists a bunch of features. Handy dandy.
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
...but if you type in your search terms twice (monkeys monkeys) you tend to get better results, because that (I believe) only looks for sites with "monkeys" written twice, removing sites just linking to the topic (and the glut of link directory things). It's cool.