Google knows etymology

Wondering about the etymology of a word? Instead of "define word" try "word etymology".

Google knows recursion

Search for "recursion" and check out what Google suggests you search your instead...

Google knows company founders

Wondering who the founders of a company are? Just search for the name of the company and add "founders" as a keyword.

Google Targets ‘Pirate’ Searches to Promote Legal Content

Google has quietly rolled out an update that places banner ads for Google Play and other content platforms above the regular search results if people search for piracy related terms. The banners in question show up on searches for a title of a movie or TV-show in combination with keywords such as “torrent,” “BitTorrent,” or “DVDrip.”

 Read the full article @ TorrentFreak.com.

Google knows holidays

Wondering what day a certain holiday falls on this year? Want a reminder on Google Now? (Assuming you're signed in to a Google account that is.) Just search for the name of the holiday and click search.

Google knows TV

Try searching for a show title and add the word "episodes" to the end of your search terms.

Google Adds Bitcoin Price Conversions

Via Tech Crunch:

One fun Google trick is the ability to type in “5 Euro in USD” and get an acceptably accurate currency conversion in a few seconds. Now, however, you can get your BTC on by simply typing “price of bitcoin” or “X bitcoin to euro.” The feature rolled out yesterday as a reaction to Bing’s addition of BTC pricing in that search engine.

Google partnered with Coinbase to support BTC conversions, according to bitcoin news site Coindesk.

The ability to use BTC in queries follows Google Finance’s addition of a special bitcoin page on the site last June.

It’s one small step for Google, one giant leap for the obsessives who track every single apparent change in bitcoin adoption.

Google gets a Flash warning

You know what’s really great? When you’re trying to access a website on your phone and the page you’re looking at uses Flash, which is not supported on iOS devices and hasn’t been supported on Android since version 4.1 started rolling out in 2012. In an effort to preempt user frustration (and nudge sites to upgrade their mobile experiences), Google is now including information about unsupported technology on a site when it turns up in mobile search results.

So if you Google a site that uses a lot of Flash and you’re on a device that doesn’t support Flash, you’ll see a result like the one pictured above, telling the user that they may be going to a site that doesn’t function properly on mobile.

Read the full post @ The Consumerist.

Google removes author photos from search results

John Mueller - Shared publicly  -  Jun 25, 2014

 

We've been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we're simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.)

For more information on using authorship on pages of your website, check out https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986

There's also a great analysis of this decision @ Search Engine Land.