Google’s search engine has been pretty rich with features for years although it is easy to forget these features because of the simple look of Google’s homepage and the ease of typing a search query right from your browser’s address bar. Here are some little tricks to make your Google searching a bit more interesting.
Search a Specific Category
Once you entered a search on Google, you will notice a few tabs located on the top of the search results. The “Images” tab is the most familiar since there are times where people might want to find a particular image that matches a description instead. But the “News”, “Videos” and “More” tabs aren’t just for decoration. In fact, “News” is a great category to consider if you are looking for current events that are related to the search query. More importantly, this category can filter out low quality websites that somehow made it to the front page. The “News” category mainly focuses on popular news sites and blogs so you are more likely to bump into quality information. The “Videos” tab can be used if you want to find a specific video in various video sharing websites. This is useful if you could not find the video in YouTube alone.
Reverse Image Search
Google Images has a pretty nifty reverse image search feature that lets you upload an image and have Google look for identical versions of the image on the Web. This is useful if you want to find out the original source of an image or try to see if the image has been doctored or is a hoax. To use this feature, go to the Google Images page and click the small camera icon. From there, you can upload an image from your computer or paste a direct link of the image if it is hosted online.
Calculate an Equation
Try entering “1+1” as your search query (without the quotes) in the Google homepage your Chrome address bar or the Google.com website and you will not only get the answer but you will also see a calculator where you can make basic calculations. Try doing some advanced things like trigonometric equations or converting units and you will see some interesting results.