BETTER GOOGLING

It seems that everyone in the world googles. It is so common that new words are made with the spelling. It is a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Yet, many people are not taking full advantage of this ubiquitous service. We are accustomed to entering a word or phrase and hitting enter, but there is much more that can be done.

Here I will cover some of the basic things that can be done with Google search.

Phrase search ("")

By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.

Search within a specific website (site:)

Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.

Terms you want to exclude (-)

Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the 'site:' operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

Fill in the blanks (*)

The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google's products (go to next page and next page -- they have many products). The query [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words. This symbol is also used as a mathematic operator. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Search exactly as is (+)

Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.

The OR operator

Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

Some Exceptions:

Search is rarely absolute. Search engines use a variety of techniques to imitate how people think and to approximate their behavior. As a result, most rules have exceptions. For example, the query [ for better or for worse ] will not be interpreted by Google as an OR query, but as a phrase that matches a (very popular) comic strip. Google will show calculator results for the query [ 34 * 87 ] rather than use the 'Fill in the blanks' operator.

As a Calculator

So there, you just saw the * used for multiplying in mathematics. You can also use Google as a calculator. Just use the basic arithmetic symbols (+ - * /).  An x in place of * will also work. You can also get a percentage of a number. Just type this (45% of 39), without the ( ) in the box. You can raise a number to a power by using ^ or ** (2^5 or 2**5).

Use Google as a spelling aid.

Entering a word into Google is a quick way to see if you have the right spelling. If it’s incorrect, Google will suggest the correct spelling instead. Additionally, if you want to get a definition of a word, you can use the “define:” operator to return definitions from various dictionaries (for example, (define: parasympathetic).

Find out what time it is anywhere in the world.

This one’s really handy if you want to make sure that you’re not phoning someone in the middle of the night. Just search for “time” and then the name of the city. For example, try: (time San Francisco).

Area code lookup.

Need to know where a phone number is located? Google will let you know where it is, and show you a map of the area, too. For example: (415).

Weather

To see the weather for many U.S. and worldwide cities, type "weather" followed by the city and state, U.S. zip code, or city and country. (weather Winder, GA)

Time

To see the time in many cities around the world, type in "time" and the name of the city. (time London)

These are some favorites, but by no means all that can be done. If you want to see a more complete list from Google go here.

I am sure you have noticed the variations of the Google logo here. These are called doodles and have an interesting history.

In 1999, the concept of the doodle was born when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. A stick figure drawing was placed behind the 2nd o in the word, Google and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.” While the first doodle was relatively simple, the idea of decorating the company logo to celebrate notable events was well received by their users.

A year later in 2000, Larry and Sergey asked current webmaster Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. Pleased with the result, Dennis was then appointed Google’s chief doodler and doodles became a regular occurrence on the Google homepage. In the beginning, the doodles tended to celebrate largely visible holidays; nowadays, doodles represent a wide array of events and anniversaries from the Olympics to the Mars Rover landing.

Over time, the demand for doodles quickly rose both in the U.S. and internationally. Creating doodles is now the responsibility of a team of talented designers. For them, creating doodles has become a team effort to enliven the Google homepage and bring smiles to a myriad of Google users worldwide. The doodle team has created over 300 doodles for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally. The other two you see here celebrate the birthdays of Hans Christian Andersen and Norman Rockwell.

Hearing Through Your Teeth

Most of us remember that Beethoven went deaf.  We often wonder how it is that such a one could compose fabulous works of music when it was impossible to hear what he was composing. As history tells us, Beethoven didn’t let a little thing like deafness stop him.

Beethoven devised a method by which he could hear what he was playing, what the music sounded like. He overcame his deafness by attaching a rod to his piano and clenching it between his teeth.  As he played, the vibrations traveled through the rod, through his teeth, through his jawbone, and into his inner ear. The same process of “bone conduction” explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us.

There are millions of people in the US and around the world who are deaf. Some of these people (about 9 million in the US) suffer from what is know as single-sided deafness (SSD), which makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact source of sounds. This can make crossing roads extremely hazardous, and also makes it hard to hear conversations in noisy rooms.

In a modern take on Beethoven’s solution, Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small devise that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and up the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. (Pictures show the devise in the teeth and the accompanying BTE [behind-the-ear] module.)

Some existing hearing aids also use bone-conduction to transmit sounds to the cochlea, but these either require a titanium post to be drilled into the skull, or rely on cumbersome headsets.  It also differs from conventional hearing aids, which employ air conduction to simply turn up the volume of sound traveling into the ear. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio voted Sonitus’s device its top medical innovation for 2010.

The devise is currently being tested. One study suggests the devise is comfortable and doesn’t damage the teeth, and that it improved speech intelligibility in noisy surroundings. The firm may start testing the devise in people with other forms of deafness and at least one functioning cochlea.

The company planned to submit its results to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval early this year, and if all goes as planned, it should become available later in the year.

Source:  New Scientist December 2009 & January 2010