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
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!