PC tricks

Google can be your phone book.
Type a person’s name, city, and state directly into the search box, and Google will deliver phone and address listings at the top of the results. The feature works for business listings too.

Google can be your calculator.
Type a math problem into the search box and Google will compute it. You can spell out the equation in words (two plus two, twelve divided by three), use numbers and symbols (2+2, 12/3), or type in a combination of both (ten million) *pi, 15% of six).

Longer is better, but shorter is ok.
Google is designed to return high-quality results even for one- or two-word queries, so you can keep your searches short. But adding a few more words often yields better results.

Use quotation marks when precision matters.
Typing “the search is over” into Google will return web pages about the rock song by Survivor – but leaving off the quotes will produce an assortment of unrelated pages. The reason: adding quote marks phrase as it was typed. That makes quote marks especially helpful when searching for song lyrics, people’s names, or expressions such as “to be or not to be” that include very common words.

Google can be your dictionary.
Type define followed by any English word into the search box, and Google will give you a quick definition at the top of the search results.

Capitalization doesn’t matter.
Save yourself time and typos: don’t brother with the SHIFT key. Googling queen Elizabeth II and queen elizabeth ii yields the same results. So whether you enter words in uppercase or Lowercase, Google treats them equally – through the Queen would prefer otherwise.

Forget pluralism.
Google automatically searches for all the stems of a word, so you don’t need to do separate searches for dance, dances, and dancing. Just type one of the words and Google will take care of the rest, giving you results all in one list.

Get the picture.
Looking for a photo of Paris Hilton, or the Paris Hilton Hotel? Click on the “Images” link above the search box, type your query, and Google will provide any photos or graphics in its database of over one billion images that match your terms, with a link to the page where they appear.

Maps, driving, directions, and satellite views are one click away:
The fastest way to finding the fastest way to your destination is to enter a city and state (or just a zip code) into the search box.

Where do you want to go today?
If you know the specific Web site you want to visit, type its name into the Google search box, hit enter, and you will be there in a flash

Browse the world’s bookshelves online.
Search for a topic at print-google.com and you will see information from actual books that Google has scanned and indexed in its database. You can browse or read the entire text of works that are not copyrighted; for others, you can see snippets of pages where your search term appears and learn where to buy a full copy.

Dial GOOGLE when you’re on the go.
Get phone numbers, directions, movie times, stocks quotes, and more delivered to your cell phone, Send a text message with your query to the number 46645 (GOOGLE on most U.S. phones) and the search engine will message you back with instant answers.

I’m Feeling Lucky.
Enter a search term and click this button on the Google homepage to bypass a long list of results and go directly to the top-matching Web page for your term.

Google can be your newscaster.
Google News, reachable via the “News” link above the search box or at news. google.com, provides up-to-the-minute information on politics, business, technology, entertainment, health, sports, and more. Type a topic of interest into the Google News search box to find the most recent stories from more than 4,500 global news sources.

Google can be your weatherman.
Type weather followed by a zip code or the name of a city, and Google will give the current conditions and a four-day forecast at the top of the results page.

Become a researcher.
Google tends to list popular and fresh pages at the top of its results, but dig beyond the first page or two of search results and you will often find older, forgotten pages that have just what you need for a research project. Also check out the “Cached” versions of Web pages that Google collects as it crawls and downloads web, which are available through a blue link at the end of every search result. The cached version of the page, and often has the content you are seeking even if the current version of the page has changed – say, a news site that removed the original story.

Become a scholar.
Serious searchers can tap into thousands of scientific and academic journals with Google Scholar. Enter a query into the search box at scholar.google.com to get abstracts and papers from published sources.

Take a magic ~ ride.
The tilde character “~” in the corner of your keyboard is a handy tool in Google searches. Put it before a word, with no space between, to have Google look for pages with both that term and its synonyms.

Pack more results onto each page.
The “Preferences” link to the right of the search box is your ticket to tweaking various settings for Google searches, including the number of results displayed per page. Increase the number of matches you see per page from the standard set of 10 to 20, 30 or more, to put more answers at your fingertips faster.

Translate into other languages.
The “Language Tools” link, also found to the right of the search box on the homepage, calls up Google’s automated translation service as well as other language options. From this page, you can translate text among numerous language (English to Spanish, French to German, Chinese to English…) or translate a Web page simply by entering its address.

Get an instant stock quote.
Type a stock ticker symbol into the search box to get a stock quote and chart on any public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. American Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.

Get PG-rated results.
A search on a serious topic like sex education might trigger objectionable material, so Google provides an optional Safe Search filter to keep results family-friendly. Click the “Preferences” link next to the search box to view and adjust the Safe Search settings (choose from “strict,” “moderate,” or no filtering).

Peer inside Google.
Click the “more>” link above the search box to find additional Google features and products as well as further tips on how to search effectively. Check out the very handy one-page Google search guide at foofle.com/help/cheatsheet.html.