Feeling Lucky? Explore flights in fun, new ways with Google

From the Google Travel Blog:

Just over a year ago, we launched an experimental feature called explore flights to give you a unique, price-focused way of exploring different destinations within a region. It's still available, but over the next few days we’ll be rolling out some of the most popular functionality right into Flight Search -- plus a few other surprises.

So, whether you know where you want to go or want to throw caution to the wind and visit some place completely new, we've got some fun, new ways to help you explore the world around you! See it in action.

Read the full post on the Google Travel Blog.

Review in Public Services Quarterly

"The book contains screen shots on almost every page to help you along your Google way and ends the book with an index. This is an extremely useful book for both patrons and library staff to help them acquire a better understanding of all that is Google. It is highly recommended for public, university, and special libraries."
—Public Services Quarterly, Melissa Aho, University of Minnesota Bio-Medical Library

"OK Google" now available to all

Well, by "all" they mean Chrome users in the US who have the default language set to English. You'll need to enable it by clicking on the microphone in the search box but once you do, as someone who's been using voice commands on my phone for a while now, it's a very handy feature.

What's the climb on your bike route?

Today we got another new feature to Google Maps: Elevation information regarding your bike route.

Knowledge Graph starting to appear in Maps

If you search maps for "famous" locations, look for the new "Quick facts" link over on the left beneath the location name and address. Clicking on that will bring up knowledge graph information about the site in question.

Google Brings Back the "Search Nearby" Feature in Maps

The new Google Maps is looking great, but many of us sorely missed the superb and simple "search nearby" function that unexpectedly vanished. Now, it's finally back.

Although it was little more than a text link at the bottom of your search results, the "search nearby" function in Google Maps was hugely popular for drilling down into exciting locational discoveries. When the revamped Google Maps went live, there was a quiet outcry when "search nearby" was found missing. But casual cartographers around the world are throwing their hats in the air as the function has just been returned to the all-new Google Maps experience.

Read the full post @ Lifehacker.com.

Bring back some lost searches

Google Search used to have an option that allowed you to restrict results to forum pages. You'll often find helpful discussions and it's nice to be able to exclude blogs, news sites, videos, shopping sites when searching for a software bug or other tech-related issues.

Fortunately, you can still restrict results to discussions: just add &tbm=dsc to a Google Search URL.

This also works for:

• recipe search: add &tbm=rcp
• local search: add &tbm=plcs
• blog search: add &tbm=blg
• patent search: add &tbm=pts 

Read the full post @ GoogleSystem.blogspot.com.