Meet your Muscles and Google

I was on a mission to learn about all the important muscles of the body (especially  the rat's nest of core muscles 8) by using google body to explore them.

Alas, it's been retired from google labs, but all is not lost. Another company will be supporting the site (as well as the tablet and phone apps) for free as before! Phew! But it's not ready yet.

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Meanwhile, for something different lets talk about how to use google search. I'm always surprised at all folks that don't know about some very useful features.

1)The first thing you need to know is that case doesn't matter. So searching for 

Miami Dolphins

is the same as 

miami dolphins

small words like ' the  so  a' are going to be removed from the search so you don't need to compose proper sentences

2) You can force a multi-word phrase to be in the search result verbatim..just do

"I like apples cooked in turpentine"

goes right to the reference I was looking for rather than lots of irrelevant pages. You can combine the quoted term with normal unquoted stuff too of course.

3) The most important feature (IMHO) is the '+'  modifier to your search.

Normally when you type in a bunch of words to search if there are results that google thinks are more important (higher page rank) they might be shown even if they are missing one of your search terms. Doing this prevents that:

miami dolphins +joe

This forces the results to have 'joe' in them. If it can't find ANY results that have joe then it will still punt (pun 8).

4) The '-' works the opposite..if you type

dolphins -football

then you'll get results that do not have the football in them...i.e. more critters less sports ;)

5) You can also restrict searches to a specific web domain. Imagine I forgot my coaches blog url (what!?)..I could do this:

jill marathon blog

But there's a lot of Jills that do marathon blogging it seems.  I happen to remember that her site is a blogspot.com site so doing:

jill marathon site:blogspot.com

works a lot better.

6) Also you probably know you can use google as a calculator...just type in any math you want solved and you'll get a solution 

e.g. 

5/7 + 100

gets you 

(5 / 7) + 100 = 100.714286

More about calculator.

7) You can also ask questions like:

tablespoons in a gallon

speed of light in miles per hour

seconds in a day

time in timbuctu

etc.

Check out www.googleguide.com for more learnin'. Google can make a lot of things much easier and knowing how to use it effectively is time well spent.

Enjoy!