Google advanced features

Posted by Bart Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:09:29 GMT

By now I'm sure lots of people know about the cool little and big tools that Google provides. Google Scholar is a great way to look up publications, Google Book is becoming an efficient way to browse libraries, not the internet (the internet is virtual library, yes, I see that relation), and there's many utilities you can quickly get information on.

Ever want to know what the population of Canada is? type in: 

  population canada
A quick calculator: 
 5 + 3 = 8
 sqrt(-3) = = 1.73205081 i
 28 fahrenheit in celsius = = -2.22222222 degrees Celsius
Custom domain search: 
  site:bartgdev.com rails

So these are cool utilities, but there's also a ton of advanced features you can use to perform your searches right in the search bar as well. For scripting these features become powerful tools, such as daterange. I found it today while researching something.

Google lets you restrict your search to specific time frames. So to check out my site's existence, changes, and references can be tracked nicely through this feature: 

  bartgdev daterange:2454101-2454131
has a few results, and: 
 bartgdev
has the whole picture, telling you how long (not that long apparently) my site has been up.

Very neat utility I think.