Google does all sorts of things they haven’t really bothered to tell anyone about, and some are more useful than others. You can, for example, very quickly see Prince’s entire discography in a bizarre order, or figure out where you’ve seen that actress on Gilmore Girls before (or not; you’re remembering Liza Weil from The West Wing, which Google doesn’t list).
Obviously, some Google features are more useful than others. Here are a few we use all the time. You should too.
Unit Conversion
Google’s Unit Converter allows you to quickly convert a quantity in one unit of measure to a quantity in another. For example, simply google “1 gallon in oz” and it’ll tell you straight away that it’s 127.998 ounces. By which it means 128 ounces. But it really is useful for quick conversions beetween measurements of temperature, length, mass, speed, volume, area, fuel consumption, time, and digital storage. If you want to know how many feet are in a Kropog, though, you’re on your own.
Define Your Terms
In most cases, you can get the most common definitions of words quickly by simply googling “define:” followed, without a space, by your mystery word. For example define:hep will tell you that this is an old-fashioned term for “hip.” And you always thought Help-Alien was a band overly focused on hepatitis.
Search Within a Site
You can restrict your Google searches to a specific site. Say you remember seeing a quote about motorcycles on IMDB. Just identify the site like this and follow it with your search terms:
site:imdb.com lorelai gilmore motorcycle
Calculate
Search for “calculator” to bring up Google’s built-in, full-featured calculator. In case, you know, your computer, smartphone, watch, and abacus don’t have built-in calculators of their own.
Lifehacker, as always, has tons of these. And then tons more. Have a google old time figuring out what you can figure out with Google hacks!
