Here is a list of 10 tips on how to use Google as more than just your regular old search engine. I’ve tried not to simply rehash different ways you can use the “Advanced Search” feature here. Google’s advanced search function is also very useful, and getting down it’s syntax will undoubtedly save much time and effort (ie. using “” to surround phrases, minus signs, boolean logic operators, etc.). However, in this list I want highlight features that while residing “in the search engine” are external to traditional “searches”:

1. Google as a dictionary

As a writer cum blogger, I am endlessly looking up the meanings and spellings of random words. I’ve found no more efficient way of doing this, for my workflow at least, than using Google’s “define: [term]” function.

Simply clack in any word that you want a definition to and Google will return a list of definitions from various sources around the net. If you’re not 100% on the spelling, just like with regular searches, Google will do it’s best to figure out what you reall mean. It can also find definitions for many slang terms and idioms as well: see definitions for “hoser“, “the staw that broke the camel’s back” and “bizzo“.

2. Google as a weatherman

Google's quick and easy weather forecast

Alright, in our widgetized world, most of us have some weather widget kicking around our desktop, but that doesn’t make Google’s handy “weather: [location]” any less useful.

Whether (ahem) you need the weather for your own city, or a city an ocean away, Google’s weather function returns the temperature, weather, wind, humidity and four-day forecast as fast as you can say “snow day”.

3. Google as a currency converter

As a Canadian living in China and often working in US dollars, this is a feature I use virtually every day. Simply type “[X amount] [3-letter currency code] to [3-letter currency code]” (see image above for example) and Google will give you a quick currency conversion. Sure, it may not be exact enough for your hard-core FOREX trader, but for an average joe like me, it’s more than suitable.

4. Google as a weights and measures converter

It’s not just currencies that Google can quickly convert – virtually any weight or measurement can also be converted from metric to imperial or vice versa. Simply query Google with “XX [unit] to [unit]“, ie. “5 cm to inches”, or “6 gal to liter”.

5. Google as a calculator

If you’re like myself and completely inept at all things mathematical, Google’s calculator function is a godsend. Sure sure, a calculator app has been a primary feature of most every OS since long before “googling” made it into our vernacular. But personally, in a tech-world where there are twenty ways to do everything, I prefer to funnel as much as I can into a few key tools. As I’m almost always online and “in browser”, using Google’s calculator just makes sense. Plus I like that I can string together relatively complex calculations visually.

6. Google as a clock

Google's World Clock

Presumably you know what time it is where your butt is pressing the chair, and if not, surely your OS has a clock. However, if you’re quickly looking for a way to find out what time it is in any city around the globe, Google’s time function is an excellent way to do that.

Simply google “time [city]” and you’ll be presented with the time of the most likely city you are looking for, as well as a couple secondary cities with the same name. Handy if you’re planning on making a transcontinental or transoceanic phone call.

7. Google as a stockbroker

Google stock quotes

If you like charts that look like mountainous landscapes, you’re going to love the fact that you can quickly pull up stock quotes with Google simply by throwing in the company’s stock ticker symbol into the search engine.

You are then presented with a daily summary of the stock’s value, as well as links to more detailed information. For example, if you search for “GOOG“, Google’s ticker symbol, you’ll be presented with results represented in the image to the right, and will also be given a quick link to the Google Inc. page on Google Finance. Google Finance also has some neat search query tools, but they’re a topic for another post.

8. Google as an air traffic controller

Google flight information

Fumbling around looking for flight arrival and departure information on airline or airport Web sites can sometimes be a bit cumbersome.

Fortunately Google takes the legwork out of the process by providing a simple way to get basic flight information. Simply google the airline and flight number and you’ll be given a quick summary on whether or not the flight is on time and what its ETD and ETA are. Unfortunately this seems only to work for flights originating in the US or Canada.

9. Google as a movie guide

If you’re looking for showtimes for a certain movie in a certain city, Google does that too. Simply query Google with “movies [movie title] [city]” and you’ll be presented with a short summary of showtimes for a couple cinemas in that city (with links for more). It also, conveniently, gives you the film’s length, rating, genre and links to a trailer and reviews. Similarly, you can simply google “movie: [movie title]” (ie. “movie: x-men”) to get a listing of movies with that title along with a star rating and links to reviews. Likewise, this works with “music:” as well.

10. Google as the Yellow Pages

Google local business listings

A great and growing feature on Google is the ability to quickly find local businesses (shops, restaurants, etc.). Tied in tightly with the most excellent Google Maps, this function allows you to simply type in a business type (ie. “plumbers”, “Thai food restaurant”, “computer repair”) followed by your city to get a listing of businesses fitting your criteria.

The results give the name of the business, the phone number and Google Maps directions to the location. Incidentally, if you happen to run your own local business, be sure to add it to Google’s listings and increase the likelihood of Google-savvy customers finding you.

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Well, there they are, 10 things perhaps you didn’t know Google could do. I guarantee that once you start using these Google tips, they will quickly become an integral part of how you find information. Even better, combining these Google tips with Google Chrome’s ability to search directly from its address bar amounts to even quicker usability – just CTRL-T (new tab), [Google query], ENTER and I’m there.

With all these ways to add to your Google experience, does it come as any surprise that Google also knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.

The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.

Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.

Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.

UPDATE: Sept 13/09 – Since publishing this tip it appears Delicious has changed the formatting of their search URL. As such, I’ve updated the URL structure in #2 to the following: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s

And while they all work (most of them anyway) decent enough, none of them blew me away as a real solution for my file sharing needs. Then I was introduced to Dropbox. The free service offers a rather liberal helping of 2GB of storage, with it easily bumped up to 5GB through referring friends. If 2-5GB isn’t enough space, a premium service of 50GB of space can be got for $10 bucks a month (which, is comparable to Mac’s iDisk, but 30GB tastier).

Open Dropbox locally or through Web interface easily.

The beauty of Dropbox is that it syncs in the background. So, for example, if I copy “familyphoto.jpg” (or an entire folder of photos) to my local Dropbox folder (Explorer in Windows and Finder on Mac) it will automatically begin syncing with the Web storage. Then, booting up another computer I have Dropbox installed on, the folder begins syncing (downloading) the new files.

It’s a fantastic way to share folders and files between two computers (in my case my Dell desktop and MacBook), but its usefulness compounds with the ability to share specific folders with other Dropbox members, or non-members by way of public folders.

Dropbox Web Interface

Click the image to the right to expand the screenshot. The Web Interface breaks things down in a simple and straightforward management UI. (1) A list of the files in the current folder you are viewing. Everything is Ajax-ifed for easy drag and drop functionality. (2) Recent Event notifications allow you to quickly see what things have changed – ie. if someone uploaded some new files to a shared folder. (3) A to-the-point info box gives you folder information on how much space a folder is taking up and how many members are sharing it. (4) An auto-fill box makes it easy to invite members to share a folder. (5) A list of the members sharing the current folder.

Dropbox also tackles the fact that not everybody you want to share files with is going to want to signup for an account. By allowing you to send them a direct link (via e-mail, IM or whatever) to a file you’ve put in one of your “Public” bins, you’ll be able to share files with anyone you want.

What’s more, Dropbox (for the moment at least) is sweet on speed. Being that I live in Asia, this is always a problem for me, as the majority of file sharing services I’ve used in the past are deadly slow here and simply time out with large files. I’ve yet to incounter any similar problem with Dropbox, and that all downloading/syncing happens in the background makes it all the more seamless.

Twitter search for “Godaddy” + “Promo”: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=godaddy+promo

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for that search result as well.

However, with just a tad of javascript you can correct this Chrome shortcoming.

Simply drag the following link to your Google Chrome Bookmarks bar:

Delicious Bookmark

Now, when you want to bookmark a page on Delicious, simply click the bookmark. Easy, huh?

Sadly, unlike Firefox’s plugin, this does nothing to integrate Del.icio.us bookmarks with Google Chrome’s bookmarks, but hopefully a fix for that is not far away.

Tip credit to Ninja Plan.

Google Chrome is a new Internet browser that has been designed from the ground up to simplify the user interface and, perhaps more importantly, streamline and speed-up the multitude of processing that happens behind the scenes when you visit a Web site.

As would be expected from a modern browser, all the bits we’re used to are there – tabbed browsing, bookmarks, a bookmark bar. However, unlike Firefox and the more recent versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome’s tabs operate in isolated “sandboxes”.

These “sandboxes” prevent one tab from bringing the whole browser down, and provide improved protection from malicious sites by using some intelligent access control.

The most exciting and lauded feature of Chrome though is a bit that most users have likely never considered and will likely never actively notice – Chrome utilizes the most powerful JavaScript engine to date, V8, making it geared to process not just modern Web apps, but the stuff that’s yet to come.

I know, I know – I love Firefox too, and though Firefox 3 has brought with it a lot of improvements, my money’s on Chrome becoming the defacto browser of choice among average users and net junkies alike.

My reasoning is thus – Google’s damn smart. I mean, they’re really smart. This is the company that not only indexes the entire Internet, but they’ve also mapped virtually the entire planet. Mozilla, while cool, is going to have a tough time competing with that – and Microsoft Internet Explorer? Well, about the ONLY thing that browser has going for it is a monopolisitic entrenchment that survives on user apathy.

Plus, unlike IE but much like Firefox, it is completely open-source, which means people are welcome, – encouraged even, to take the code and improve it – without a doubt the reason why Firefox and Mozilla rock.

I’ve been using Chrome all day and, if you haven’t guessed, absolutely love it. Here are the few things I like:

• Slick tab addition and deletion – adding tabs in any other browser is going to feel clunky and brash after you’ve used Chrome.
• Tab pull-outs – you can easily pull off your tab, making it a new window, and vice versa, you can slap an independent browser window into a tab.
• New tab quick links – rather than have a blank screen greeting you when you open a new tab, Google Chrome displays a collection of screenshots of sites you frequently visit, rightly assuming you’re likely to be going to one of them.
• Omnibox Address/Search bar – the “Omnibox” is Google Chrome’s intelligent address bar. It allows you to input an address or a search term (your choice of search engine) and offers smart auto-complete.
• Pop-up control – all pop-ups are “blocked” by default, with a notice allowing you to open them or not.
• Incognito window – If you’re looking for a bit of browsing privacy, Chrome allows you to easily open up an “Incognito tab” which isn’t recorded in the browsers history – you know, for when you are looking at porn buying your wife a surprise gift.

However, not everything is yet perfect in Chromeville. The biggest downside Google will need to combat if they want to sway the relatively newborn masses of Firefox users is the absense of extensions/add-ons. There is currently no ability to add extensions (outside of plugins like Flash, Java, etc.), so if you are stuck on some Firefox add-ons, you’ll need to be patient and see if abilities are added after the browser comes out of beta.

And yeah, it’s beta – so it’s still technically being tested. As mentioned, I’ve been running it all day without a glitch, but fellow Twitterholics have reported some problems – whether they’re Chrome related or system related is unknown.

Additionally, Google Chrome is not yet available for Mac or Linux users – for the time being it is strictly Windows-based. However, I’m certain we can expect Mac and Linux versions in the near future.

If you’d like to dive a bit deeper into how Chrome works and why it’s being touted as “a revolutionary new browser”, check out this easy to follow comic. You can download and try Chrome for yourself without uninstalling your current browser(s). Oh, and be sure to check out Matt Cutts’ answers to common Google Chrome objections.

With AOL’s Xdrive going under, Drop.io is poised to pick up their lost users. Drop.io sent out a message from their twitter account about an hour ago:

Know anyone looking for an alternative to xdrive? Tell them to try Drop.io! http://drop.io/welcomeXdrive

They link to a page which tells a bit about their services, but hidden away at the bottom is the neato 1G upgrade promo (from the regular 100MB) that you should jump on while it’s hot:

To use drop.io’s “Xdrive” premium code, just follow the directions below:

1. Click on the “upgrade” icon below the “add files” box (as depicted in the image below).
2. Type in: “Xdrive” in the box that pops up.
2. Set your password.
3. Drop your files.
3. And you’re set – welcome to Drop.io!

Enjoy everybody!

Update: Drop.io is now pushing a second promo code, “boxdotnet,” which will get you the same sorta deal. Not sure how long these will last, but check them out while you can.

In the battle for consistent design there is no more fearsome foe than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Despite the browser quickly coming up on its eighth birthday, it is still in wide use – particularly in markets where software piracy is more wide-spread and users aren’t able to upgrade to the “Windows Genuine Advantage”-required IE7 or IE8.

As such, it’s important that you be able to test your design, theme/template, or even your blog tweaks to assure that they work alright in the archaic and anarchistic browser.

One problem – due to kernal code differences, it isn’t possible to install Internet Explorer 6 or lower on a machine running Windows Vista. So where handy bundles like the MultipleIE package worked well on XP – they’re a no go on Vista.

There are some great static checks you can do using Web apps like Browser Shots and IE NetRenderer, but sometimes you need to interact with the design to see where things are, or aren’t, functioning.

Enter IETester. Created by the same developer as the IE DebugBar, the free Web browser offers up the rendering and javascript abilities of IE5.5 to IE8.

Not only are you able to test how your layouts will look in various IE versions, with the use of the browser’s tabs, you can test multiple versions in the same browser window.

What’s more – it works on both XP and Vista (sorry Mac and Linux users). It’s not flawless, and preliminary usage showed a couple hiccups in the page loading – but for an alpha release, and with nothing else to turn to, who’s complaining.

With users slowly overcoming their adversity of pushing away from the Microsoft monopoly, there’s hope that IE6 will die the death it so rightly deserves, but until then apps like IETester are a welcome helping hand.

Here’s my E-Mail.

How neato is that?

Re-Captcha also offers their service to stop comment spam. They offer plugins for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type — basically all the major content management systems.

“I’ve seen Anti-Spam tools before. Why use this one?”

I’ll tell ya why. Each time a person types a captcha, it helps to digitize a book:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Isn’t that ingenius?

So you first you name your “drop.” I just made drop.io/tiptrickmod. Choose something easy to remember. Then upload your file, set a password if you like, and “drop” it.

Now while this file sharing feature is enough to make drop.io noteworthy, here are a few more functions which make it thoroughly kick arse:

1. Embeddable Upload Widget

You can also embed an upload widget into your site, and people can upload files to you directly to your drop. See? Here’s ours:

2. Email and RSS

Stay up to date on when the drop is updated. So for example, if my friend shares a photo with me, I’ll be notified. You can also email media to your drop. The email address for our drop is tiptrickmod@drop.io. If I wanted to send a photo from my phone directly to this drop via email, it’s easy. Yes, flickr has that too. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t cool.

3. Phone your Drop

Ok. Here’s where it gets cool. You can phone your drop using the telephone number they provide (each drop is unique) and your call will be recorded in mp3 format. Feel like leaving TipTrickMod an mp3 message? Call 646-495-9203 x 73504. This is a way neato tool. Podcasters, you listening? Oh yeah… There’s a conference call option as well, if you’d like to give that a go too.

4. Receive a fax

And yes, to round it all off you can receive faxes as well.

Hope you guys find that useful! I know I did.