Did you know that you can use google for much more than surfing? Apart from being able to just search websites you can get the local time anywhere, get stock quotes, use it as a simple calculator, and so much more. Here are a few tricks to make you a more productive Google user.

Caluclator

This is a feature I use a whole lot and it’s extremely simple. Just type in a simple expression and Google will solve it for you. I think the calculator goes as far as square roots, so if you need your quadratic equations solved look elsewhere. However for simple multiplication tasks or additions, just write in what you need like so:

“126+3235″
“76*12″

Currency converter

This is something I tried a few months back because I was converting currencies a lot and I thought, hey, maybe Google has this. So I wrote “420 USD in HUF” which neatly converted my $420 into Hungraian Forints. To use this you need to know the three letter abbreviation of the currency you need, but looking that up is just a few seconds. Be sure to always caps all the characters in the currency’s name though or else it won’t work. Here’s the syntax again:

“125 USD in GBP”
“300 EUR in USD”

Time finder

Finding the time anywhere is really easy with Google, all you need to do is prefix any city with “time”. The cool thing about this is that Google lists all found cities, since there are four “Plymouth’s” for example, and seeing them all listed, and their location makes finding any time a cinch, just use:

“time Plymouth”
“time Budapest”

Weather

Finding the weather in any city is exactly the same as finding the time, just prefix the city with “weather” and you’ll get forecasts for anywhere. Sadly this doesn’t work as flexibly as the time option, you won’t get all the cities listed if you just type Plymouth, but it’s still a quick and easy way to get a forecast, just type:

“weather Budapest”
“weather Los Angeles”

Unit conversion

I used to live in the US, but since I have been using meters and kilograms for 20 years, so I’m a bit out of touch with pounds and inches. In these cases unit conversion is really handy, but you usually have to visit a site for that which takes way to long. Just type it into Google! You can convert a lot of types here, just use the following syntax:

“16mi in km”
“75kg in lbs”

Spell checking

I don’t know if this is a real feature or not, but if you don’t know how to spell a word, just type it into Google, if you misspell it, Google will ask you if you meant something else. If you type recieve instead of receive, Google will say: “Did you mean receive?”. The functions here a pretty limited and in some extremely rare words may not work, but for the simple spell checking of one word it’s perfect.

I just found a cool service called GoodSearch which is simply a search site, but promises to give half its revenue to charity. You can even specify which charity you want to support and if they can verify it, they will send the money to them.

The reason this works great is that you can also buy from adobe.com or Bestbuy through them for example. This way, even if you don’t normally use GoodSearch, you can just buy through them and know that you will be donating some money to charity as well. For you this means a warm fuzzy feeling, the charity gets money as well, and so does GoodSearch, so everyone is now a happy camper.

I wouldn’t exchange simple Google for anything, but I think whenever I order online I will do it through them, if for nothing else, just to acknowledge that I love this idea and I think there could be hidden possibilities here. We search hundreds of items every da, why not try and use this to do some good?

One of the best features in Remember the Milk is the smart list, which is essentially a search option, but your searches can be saved permanently. Normally you would want to save a search because you perform them often, but in Remember the Milk there are more benefits.

I actually only have one “real” list in RTM, the others are all smart lists. So I have loads of tasks, all in one list, but tagged well. This means that if I search for “tag: blog”, it will show me all my blog related tasks. If I save that search, I now have a new list, with every item tagged with blog. The productivity aspect enters right here, because you aren’t limited to just viewing, you can edit and create tasks inside the smart list.

This means that if you create a task, it will automatically be tagged with “blog”, and of course it will be created in your primary list. This feature is great if you do some more complex searches, like incomplete priority 1 tasks, tagged with “blog” and due tomorrow. These are you most important tasks probably, so you may want to keep an eye on them. You can either type “priority:1 and status:incomplete and tag:blog and dueWithin:”1 of today”" in the search field, or you can use the search options too. When you save this as a smart list and create a new task, it will automatically be assigned all these attributes. This saves you time, increasing your productivity because there is no need to tag all your tasks.

I recommend having only 1, maybe two main lists, and creating all your other lists from them using smart lists. This makes sense from a GTD and productivity view, possibly even database management view because it eliminates redundancy, and auto-creates what you need. I also find that sometimes it’s useful to see all your tasks, regardless of their properties in one place.

I found a good looking online photo recommendation service called Photoree on Freeware Genius, and thought I’d share my opinion with you guys. My final verdict was that it I like this service, and it may be useful as an alternative source of Photos, but ultimately it is not (yet) something that I will use a lot. Despite this, I have contacted the creators and told them my opinion and would like to actively help them, since I see a lot of potential in this.
After registering you can start to rate photos immediately, just simply give it a thumbs up, or thumbs down. I couldn’t totally determine the effectiveness of their method, but what I do know is that during the initial 100 that is needed to generate statistics I consistently gave a thumbs down to all pics where the main subject was a person. After the first hundred I didn’t really see any pics with a person on it, so I guess that this part is well done.

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The service is useful because it gives you an alternative method of searching for photos. Sometimes the best pics I find are ones that I stumble upon randomly, and this is the kind of service that helps me in this department. Also, the interface is very nice, all pics you thumbed up are saved for you, you can view them in a good looking thumbnail interface.

The statistics is also a useful place to visit. You can see users with a taste similar to yours. After 100 photos, a user had an 85% similarity to me, and indeed, I found a lot of pics in her favorites I liked. You can of course click on her favorites and rate them. All this is done in a lightning fast flash popup, so you don’t even have to navigate away. You can also view the top authors you liked. Again, this is useful for further exploration, you can visit their Flickr page and so on.

Where I think the application could improve is the management of saved pictures. The way I would use this, is I would thumb up alot of the pics I like and then tag them. I could go through hundreds in about half an hour. Whenever I need a picture of a bridge, where there are also a lot of trees, I could just find it in my saved pics. Since I already thumbed it up I am sure to like it, and since I can go through hundreds in a short time there’s a good chance there will be one with these parameters.

Overall I became more and more fond of Photoree as I was writing this short review. I actually rewrote my verdict at the beginning because as I delved deeper, I found how this is, and could become a service that is as good for exploration as it is great for productivity and organization.

Yes, I know, it sounds a bit weird, but I’ve gotten into the habit of taking notes using Firefox’s Goggle search field. Basically, a few thoughts on posts came to my mind and I didn’t have any pen and paper at hand and I didn’t want to open a notepad.

I came up with a solution that proved to be a great way of jotting down some thoughts in a productive way. All I do is when something comes to mind, like writing a post on Adobe Buzzword (coming up), is I open a new tab (Ctr + T) and type “Adobe Buzzword” in the search field. I don’t even wait for it to load, I go back to what I was doing immediately.When I am ready to “process” these thoughts, I go to the tab with the search and I will remember that I wanted to write about and in addition, I have already started some research by searching for it. When you process you can decide to write it down somewhere else, save the page as a bookmark, or just delete it.

I actually have a separate Firefox window (Ctr + N) open for this because it keeps my thoughts separate (I work a lot in Firefox) and I can also batch bookmark all my ideas at once. You can do this by the bookmarks menu and selecting bookmark all tabs (Ctr + Shift + D). When you are ready to make another pass at them, just go to the bookmarks menu, select the folder where you stored them, right click and select open all in tabs. Be careful, because your current tab will also load one of the bookmarks.

You can play around with setting up folders for this as well, or maybe posting some of these to del.icio.us or some other bookmark site, there are quite a lot of possibilities. For now I just use this casually, but I will look into it a bit more when I get the time. If any of you have any ideas please do share.