10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google

Google is amazing (please thank me for this amazing revelation). There are some things you probably didn’t know Google can do. Take your time and read the information below. You’ll likely learn a few tips and tricks that will make you appreciate Google even more.

10. Find a beautiful wallpaper for your desktop resolution with Google images

Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Advanced Image Search
2. Next to “Exact size” click on “Use my desktop resolution”. Then, next to “Content types” select “Photo content.”
3. Enter some words. If you want to find cows, enter beautiful cows. Let’s see the results:

Notice that many of the images in the results are from wallpaper sites. Google Images makes it very convenient to go through these types of sites and browse them like a gallery instead of going to each gallery site separately.

9. Create unlimited disposable email addresses with Gmail

Take the following example:

That’s right, you can add one or more dots ANYWHERE between your username and send messages to that ‘new’ email. All of those messages will arrive to your old (without dots) email. Hard to explain without a picture. But somehow Google did find a way to do it…

Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address that looks like yours but has a different number or arrangement of periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think someone else’s mail is being routed to your account, don’t worry: both of these addresses are yours.

Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they’ll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

• homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com
• homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com
• homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You’ll still go to your account.

Yep, this is an explanation from Google itself. Now that you understand this, let’s keep going.

8. Search videos durations using Google Video

I’ve noticed there’s not a single video site that allows you to search videos by duration. Let’s say I want to learn Spanish and I want comprehensive videos for that (longer than 20 minutes.) To search, I go to Google Advanced Video Search page and select “Long” next to “Duration”. Here’s what happens:

Now all that’s left is to get some free time and watch those…

7. Want to find an iPad alternative using Google Search?

Sure, you can write ‘iPad alternative’ in Google but that won’t give you the best results. Instead, try this:

Using “better than product” where product=any product will give you not only alternatives but better alternatives to a particular product. Very cool.

6. Detect any unknown language with Google Language Detector

I have a big problem:

What’s the solution? Google language detector.

Another good way to detect and also translate is to use Google Translate and the “Detect Language” option:

5. See what the Dutch haven been searching for recently using Google Insights

Google is the most popular search engine in almost any country in the world. Google Insights (like the name suggests) gives you ‘insights’ of what people have been searching for around the world. For example, Netherlands:

Hyves is a Dutch portal and social network. Weer seems to be a weather portal.

4. When did Google become more popular than Microsoft? Google Trends has the answer

Google Trends helps you discover the trends on various topics and see what people have been searching for over time. In this case, you can see when people started searching for Google more than Microsoft in early 2005.

3. Hate opening PDF files? Google Docs is the solution

So you’ve been searching on Google for a particular topic and found a PDF file:

Instead of opening the file in Adobe Reader (which is a painful process), you can click on “Quick View” and open the file in Google Docs! It takes seconds to open and it’s way more flexible. If you choose later, you can always save the file as PDF by choosing the export option in Google Docs.

2. Scan and Read your RSS feeds like email messages in Google Reader

You probably know how easy it is to open and read email messages in Gmail thanks to the list view. Well, you can do the same in Google Reader:

The default view in Google Reader is ‘expanded’ which makes the items pretty difficult to scan and read. If you change the view from expanded to ‘list’, then it becomes WAY easier to SCAN items and pick what you like.

1. Google can tell you the answer to life and the universe