Beyond Google

Other facets of the world’s favourite search engine.

Circa 2004 onwards, the computing universe, as you may be aware, is mightily smitten with one search standard: Google. www.google.com has grown to become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary Internet culture. Nay, it is well nigh a synonym for Web searches. So most of us look upon Google so fixedly as a search engine that we fail to acknowledge several other specialised features that have grown around Google itself. Here’s a peek at some of these.

Special Searches
www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html
This enables you to confine you quest to specific topics. Namely: Microsoft, Apple Macintosh, Linux, BSD, and the U.S. Government. The Public Service Search offers rummaging around in educational institutions and non-profit organizations worldwide. Those interested in US education can use the University Search function here. This facilitates searching for things like admissions information, course schedules, or alumni news out there.

Alerts
www.google.com/alerts/
Google Alerts are wonderful little e-mail updates or alerts you can set up for yourself for the latest relevant Google results (news, articles, info etc.). The alerts are based on your query or topic choice. You can keep tabs on specific industry news, business competitors, celebrities, products, sports… whatever. To create a Google Alert, you enter the topic you wish to monitor, pick the type of source (news, blogs, web, groups, or comprehensive), how often do you want the updates (ranging from as it happens to once a week), and bang out your e-mail Id. Voila!

Book Search
http://books.google.com/
From the annals of academia. This microsite lets you search book texts, provides snippets, locates ones that interest you, and even helps you buy them. An 'About this book' gives you basic bibliographic data like title, author, publication date, length and subject. Booking viewing varies between, no previews, snippet views, limited previews to full view. If a book is out of copyright, or publisher permitted, you can browse the entire book from beginning to end, as often as you want. If the book is in the public domain, you can also download it.

Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
An uncomplicated method to seek sources on scholarly literature. Here you can dig around in several disciplines—across peer-reviewed papers (in any area of research), theses, books, citations, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. A must visit site for any and every persevering academic. Because here you find yourself standing on the shoulders of giants.

Suggest
www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
This makes searching easier for many of us by volunteering suggestions, even as you type. For example, as you are typing in “rabbi” and you will get a selectable drop-down offering you possibilities that will straight away taper down your search from “rabbit” to “rabbi shergill” to the “rabbi trusts”. Similarly, keying in "prog," may get you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You simply choose one by scrolling up or down the list of alternatives with the arrow keys or mouse and select what you want. Simplifies our drilling for information a lot, doesn’t that?

Other Google Tools

Blog Search
www.google.com/blogsearch
Perform Google searches focused on blogs.

Directory
www.google.com/dirhp
The World Wide Web prearranged by topic into categories.

Earth
http://earth.google.com/
Combines satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world's geographic infor at your fingertips.

Froogle
http://froogle.google.com/
To find products for sale online, or even check the prices of products abroad.

Language Tools
www.google.com/language_tools
Let’s you search specific languages or countries. And translates.

Maps
http://maps.google.com/
Hmmm… Great only for some parts of world.

Patent Search
www.google.com/patents
Search the full text of 7 million U.S. patent corpus and find ones that interest you.

Trends
www.google.com/trends
See what the world is searching for and find out how your interests compare.

Video
http://video.google.com/
An open online video directory you can search, watch and buy an ever-growing collection of TV shows, movies, music videos, documentaries, personal productions and more.