Waukegan Public Library - Google

Using Google Like a Pro: Part Six

Sara T — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:27:55 +0000

To conclude our Using Google Like a Pro series, I want to share some Google “Easter eggs”. These are fun little secrets that Google employees hide in various services. Here are some of my favorites:

Walking directions from The Shire to Mordor
Navigate to maps.google.com. Click Get directions. Enter The Shire as your starting point and Mordor as your destination, then click the icon for walking directions. Nerds rejoice!

Have you ever played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? I’m not very good at that game, but Google is! Just type an actor’s name and the phrase bacon number and Google makes the Kevin Bacon connection for you.

Google Translate is great for getting quick translations, but did you know you can make it beatbox? Just copy and paste this text into Google Translate, tell it to translate into German, and click Listen:

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch

And now, I congratulate you! If you’ve read the six-part Using Google Like a Pro series, you’re now a better Googler than all your friends!

Using Google Like a Pro: Part Five

Sara T — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:12:26 +0000

Are you a political junkie? Diehard Cubs fan? Supporter of a local museum or (ahem) library? If so, you may be interested in hearing all the news about your favorite group and the best way to do that is to set up a Google alert.

When you set up a Google alert, Google will email you when it indexes a webpage that contains your selected phrase. You can choose how often to receive emails, and whether you get every result or the most popular ones. Let’s set up an alert for the library.

Start by navigating to google.com/alerts. Type in your search query (it’s best to type the exact phrase in quotation marks to avoid unrelated results). Choose your preferences from the drop-down menus and type in your email address. When you’re ready, just click CREATE ALERT. You’re done!

Using Google Like a Pro: Part Three

Sara T — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:09:41 +0000

Conversions, calculations, math problems… if you’re not a fan of math, you can use Google to perform basic calculations. Here are some of my favorites:

Converting Celsius to Fahrenheit:

How about cooking conversions?

The jeans you want are $69 and there’s a 35% off sign next to the rack. Is it a good deal?

You’re admiring a painting that a friend brought back from India when she casually mentions that she paid 10,000 rupees for it. What?! How much is that in American money?

Using Google Like a Pro: Part Two

Sara T — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:34:11 +0000

Search engines exist to trawl the internet for our search queries and return relevant answers. Google has always performed that function, but did you know that you can also use Google to get answers to your questions directly? Here’s how it works:

Imagine you want to know the movie times for theaters in our area. Instead of conducting an internet search for websites that offer movie listings, you can type movies Waukegan to get results instantly:

You can also ask Google about the dates of holidays or when daylight savings time begins:

Have friends in a different time zone? Check the time to make sure you don’t wake them up the next time you call:

Check the weather by typing the word weather and a city or ZIP code:

Using Google Like a Pro: Part One

Sara T — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:45:48 +0000

Do you ever wonder how some people always seem to find what they’re searching for online? You can become a searching expert, too! All you need are some neat Googling tricks hidden up your sleeve. Today is the first post in a series about using Google like a pro to get librarian-level search results. The first trick I want to share is domain-specific searching.

Domain-specific searching takes your general keyword search and narrows it to a domain (for instance, waukeganpl.org) or a domain ending (.com, .org, .gov and .edu are examples). This type of search is useful if you have a favorite site for information, or you are working on a homework project and need to find reliable information.

Let’s imagine that you’re interested in buying a book, but you want to know whether it’s ever been reviewed by the New York Times. This is the first search you try:

Your results look like this:

Yikes! Not exactly what you’re looking for. Try this little trick for narrowing your results to just the New York Times website:

This time, Google searched only the New York Times website for the phrase President Kennedy: Profile of Power.

The very first result is a link to the book review. When using the site: function, make sure to type the website address or domain ending directly after site: without any spaces. Happy Googling!