Google does indeed live up to its name.
Written: Jun 20 '01 (Updated Jun 21 '01)
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The Bottom Line
Google will find you almost any information on the net, and it will do it faster than any other service I've tried.
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| Full Review |
I am going to make the assumption that since you're reading this, and because it's an online opinion, and as it's illegal to post these anywhere else or recreate them, you are online right now. From this I will infer with great intelligence that you do other things online. Furthermore, I know in my heart that you use the internet for information, probably research, likely for telephone numbers and addresses, maybe for maps...
Where am I going with this? Ok, ok...getting to the point. My final magic trick will be to inform you that you have a big favorites list and on it you have a lot of sites that allow you to do all I mentioned above and more. The point of this particular review is to get you to delete that list...here we go.
Search Capabilities
Bar none, Google is the fastest AND most accurate search engine I have ever used. Try the "I'm feeling lucky" button some time, it simply returns the first hit that Google gets. More than half the time, it's a site that I'm looking for. Try clicking the first link that Yahoo or Webcrawler or Altavista comes up with...
This is due to Google's indexing system. They take surveys of the web and use them to index sites in order of relevance, thus performing the magic that allows them to know what you're searching for and find it. Their method is unique to Google. They actually count the links from one page to another and weight a page's likeliness to be relevant, according to the number of links to it. Links to other pages from highly relevant sites weight the importance of the linked page more than links from less relevant site, thus recursively weighting networks of relevant sites. Basically, if Yahoo links to a website I make, Google is probably going to find it if a unique phrase from my site is typed into its search engine, as opposed to if www.kravmaga.com linked to my site; the KM site is a lot less "important" to google and therefore it imparts less weight to the sites it links to.
All in all, the search algorithms and indices are amazing; if you're looking for anything I highly recommend you start here.
Telephony Information
Betcha didn't know about this one...
Does anyone have caller ID, and get the occasional prank call? Wouldn't you like to be able to take the nameless number you got and find out who it is, without having the police wiretap your phone line? Yep, here it is...try typing a phone number into the google search engine. Well what do you know? Name, address, links to maps. This feature also takes care of my annoying habbit of jotting down phone numbers thinking that I'll remember who they belong to without writing the name. You'd think I would learn, but now I don't have to. For other information about businesses or personal residences, the following can all be entered into the search box:
*start quote from Google.com*
first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
first name (or first initial), last name, state
first name (or first initial), last name, area code
first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
phone number, including area code
last name, city, state
last name, zip code
*end quote*
But wait, there's more!
You can search for PDF files...
Add filetype:pdf to the end of your search string.
You can pick up stock quotes, just enter the symbols.
Find out what pages are linked to a page (useful for reverse-engineering a site to find out weird info or stuff that's hard to search for):
link:http://www.epinions.com
To search within a particular domain:
admission site:http://www.epinions.com
Possibly the most interesting feature on the site - it's a dictionary, too! Any word in your query for which they have a definition indexed will appear in the blue bar under the word GOOGLE, underlined. Click it for the definition.
Final Notes
That's it, Everything Google in about 3 minutes. It does it all, and I'm sure there's more to come (they're working on language translation, some of them are already in beta). If you haven't used Google, give it a shot...I think you'll be amazed, and you might even trim down that favorites list.
Please note! If you liked this review, sign up and rate it!
Recommended:
Yes
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About the Author
Location: Ohio, USA
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me: CompE and Opinionated American. Where would we be if we couldn't trust ourselves?
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