neat google tricks

I may be the last person to find out about this, but I think it is neat enough to write about anyway.

Google, the answer guru
Instead of pointing to a web site that has the answer to one’s burning question, Google sometimes will answer the question directly. If the reader has not experienced this before, try these searches in a Google searchbox:

how many acres in a square mile?
how many bytes in a gigabyte?
how many ounces in a ton?
how many ounces in a metric ton?

What one can’t do is just ask Google any old question and get a direct answer. For instance, Google was able to directly answer one of the questions I threw out there,

• who was the first US president?

but not others:

• who was the first man to walk on the moon
• who was the last Russian Czar
• how far to the moon

Interestingly enough, if one ends those phrases with a question mark, one get a suggestion to try Google Answers, a pay service, along with the top search search results for the query. For comparison, I tried another good search engine, Ask Jeeves. Jeeves did give the answers to the questions above, with the exception of “how far to the moon”. Both Google and Ask Jeeves used the results of a web search to come up with the answers to the last four, non-conversion-type questions, along with a disclaimer of “according to ….”.

Google, the poor man’s Caller-ID
Google can also work like a poor man’s caller-id, especially for land-lines. Put in somebody’s phone and hit enter. Try MJG’s, if you know it. It works quite nicely with his. I put in his phone number, and the Google came back with his name and street address, along with links to not just a map of his house via Google Maps, but Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest, as well. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to work with cell phone numbers or unlisted numbers. It didn’t pick up my work number, xxx-3276, but it did work with the general number, xxx-1000, which is what shows up in the caller id box, at least when I call our customers.

Google, coordinator of distributed computing for common good
As it happens, I almost always have an extra computer sitting around. Currently, that computer is my old faithful Gateway. As a side project, if one happens to have a computer just sitting around doing nothing (extra or not), perhaps you might find the Google Labs project Google Compute interesting and worthy of some of your CPU cycles. Basically, Google has integrated another feature into their Google toolbar. Google Compute will take all the extra cycles of your CPU and put them to work helping Stanford study protein folding. Folding@Home is the official website of the project currently receiving the benefit of all those Google Compute cycles. It is exciting that something that normally gets wasted can be put to use in research.

One catch of the Google Compute tool is that it currently only works with the Internet Explorer version of the Google Toolbar, which means using both Windows and Internet Explorer. This is probably most folks normal mode of computing, but the only Windows box I have at home is my old sidekick Gateway. For folks running Linux or Mac boxes, there are clients available on the Folding@Home download page that will let you participate without going through Google Compute’s tool.