Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Google knows etymology

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


Monday, July 28, 2014

Google knows recursion

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


Friday, July 25, 2014

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.


Thursday, July 24, 2014

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.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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.


Sunday, July 20, 2014

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.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

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.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Google removes author photos from search results


- 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.