Google search feature Guide

Google, A leading search engine that we use every day to search content on internet. but google.com is not only for searching web pages from web. Google.com has many amazing features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. but Some of the most useful features that you can in your daily life. like check the who link with you or mathematical calculation . Here I tell you more then 11 Great Hidden Secrete Google Can Do That You Should Know and use in your daily life .

1.Package Tracking : You can track packages by typing the tracking number for your UPS, Fedex or USPS package directly into the search box. We’ll return results that include quick links to easily track the status of your shipment.
2. phonebook : With Google search you can Search the phone number of your clients , friends and even college friend .The phone book operator can be used to find both the official and residential phone numbers of people. Three operators can be used for the phonebook search: rphonebook, bphonebook and phonebook, which will search residential listings, business listings, or both, respectively.
A query such as:

phonebook:ABC def ny

would list both business and residential listings for abc def in New York. but if you concerned about your privacy and  your address information being in Google's databases for the world to see . so, don’t worry Google give you right to delete your address information from Google's databases , just Fill out the form at and your information will be removed, usually within 48 hours.

2. Earthquakes : To see information about recent earthquakes in a specific area type "earthquake" followed by the city and state or U.S. zip code. For recent earthquake activity around the world simply type "earthquake" in the search box. Google tell the latest news and report about recent earthquakes activity around the world .


3. Spell Checker : Google’s spell checking software automatically checks whether your query uses the most common spelling of a given word. If it thinks you’re likely to generate better results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”. Click the suggested spelling to launch a Google search for that term.


4. Local Search : If you’re looking for a store, restaurant, or other local business you can search for the category of business and the location and we’ll return results right on the page, along with a map, reviews, and contact information.

5. Real Estate and Housing : To see home listings in a given area type "housing", "home", or "real estate" and the name of a city or a U.S. zip code into the Google search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. Clicking the "Go" button on the results page will display details of individual homes that Google has indexed.


6. Area Code : To see the geographical location for any U.S. telephone area code, just type the three-digit area code into the Google search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button.

7. The OR operator : Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator. For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

8. Use the Plus (+) and Minus (-) Signs. : The plus sign just before a search term means "This MUST be found in the search". Conversely, if you find a lot of search results that include a specific product, word, phrase, or item that you do not want to see, you can put a minus sign before that word or phrase, and those results will be excluded from your search. You can even exclude domains or top-level domains from your search - see the site: command below.

9. Use the Asterisk (*) As a WildCard search term.  : you can insert an asterisk in your search phrase and it will act as a wild card matching any word in that place in the phrase. Not only that, but you can insert more than one asterisk in place of more than one word in your search phrase, up to the limit of ten search words - and the wild card markers are not counted toward this ten word limit.

10. filetype :  This is my favorite operator. Using this, you can search for a specific file type in the internet. Suppose you want to search for a document for linux and you only desire PDF file types. The query you should enter into Google is as follows:

filetype:pdf linux

If you want to search for mp3 music to download, type filetype:mp3 and the artist name followed by that. This search will fetch you any such mp3 file in the pages which Google has crawled.

Actually there are many many many more awesome google search features besides these features but they were the least known.
Some useful links:
Google search basics: More search help
Learn how using some characters can improve the quality of the Search results

Google Search Feature
Some ways to lure out the most common things from google

Google Advanced search
Don't want to remember these tips? Okay! Google has a solution, Google Advanced search.

Improve your Google Search

The Basic search help article covers all the most common issues, but sometimes you need a little bit more power. This document will highlight the more advanced features of Google Web Search. Have in mind though that even very advanced searchers, such as the members of the search group at Google, use these features less than 5% of the time. Basic simple search is often enough. As always, we use square brackets [ ] to denote queries, so [ to be or not to be ] is an example of a query; [ to be ] or [ not to be ] are two examples of queries.

• Phrase search ("")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
• Search within a specific website (site:)
  Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.
• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the 'site:' operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.
• Fill in the blanks (*)
  The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google's products (go to next page and next page -- we have many products). The query [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.
• Search exactly as is (+)
  Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around the word will do the same thing.
• The OR operator
  Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

Exceptions

Search is rarely absolute. Search engines use a variety of techniques to imitate how people think and to approximate their behavior. As a result, most rules have exceptions. For example, the query [ for better or for worse ] will not be interpreted by Google as an OR query, but as a phrase that matches a (very popular) comic strip. Google will show calculator results for the query [ 34 * 87 ] rather than use the 'Fill in the blanks' operator. Both cases follow the obvious intent of the query. Here is a list of exceptions to some of the rules and guidelines that were mentioned in this and the Basic Search Help article:

Exceptions to 'Every word matters'

• Words that are commonly used, like 'the,' 'a,' and 'for,' are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization -- Google will not ignore the word 'the' in the first query.
• Synonyms might replace some words in your original query. (Adding + before a word disables synonyms.)
• A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word 'overhead.'

Punctuation that is not ignored

• Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
• The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
• The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the - and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
• The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].

Sperse.com Meta Search Engine

People usually tend to stick to the search engines they like, but there are often times when your search engine doesn’t give you required results and you turn to others. A meta search engine is one that searches multiple engines like Google, Yahoo e.t.c. and shows you aggregated results. One such smart and accurate meta search engine is Sperse.

Sperse searches multiple engines and remove duplicate results in order to provide the user with more accurate and relevant results. In addition to the traditional web pages, Sperse also allows you to search images, news, music, video and much more. One of the coolest features that Sperse offers is the ability to preview the webpage directly from the search results.

Main features of Sperse:

• Smart meta search engine that combines results from Google, Yahoo! and Ask.
• Filters out duplicate results for better accuracy and relevancy.
• Search the web, images, videos, music and even local listings.
• A real-time thumbnail preview accompanies each search result.
• Narrow your search by location using zip codes.
• Type a question and get an answer using Yahoo! answers.

Check out Sperse @ www.sperse.com

RSS Feeds for Google Web Search Results

 

A rumor that's been floating around the web lately is that Google will offer RSS feeds for new results in basic web search. Today Search Engine Land confirmed that Google will "soon" offer this functionality. Why is this big news? Because there's no better way to keep track of new mentions of a company, person or concept online than through RSS.

As Search Engine Land's Matt McGee points out in his post, Google is the only major web search engine to not offer feeds for basic web search, as they do in blog search and news. We'd previously recommended Live.com for web search feeds, but who really cares about Live.com search results? They're terrible. Google feeds are good news.

Google says that the new feeds will be part of the Google Alerts product, which currently delivers e-mail alerts for new search results in web, blog and other result types. Google Alerts are widely used but are, we'd argue, like training wheels for people not yet comfortable with RSS feeds. There's nothing wrong with that, but many of us want our feeds.
Though blogs and news sites are of growing importance, there's still nothing quite like good old Web Search for getting a broad picture of who is linking where and what kind of online mentions are occurring. Google says it cannot confirm when the web search feeds will be available.
We hope that Google web search feeds will include "site:" searches for new mentions of keywords inside particular domains (Live and Yahoo do), and that they will deliver nice clean direct URLs - which Live.com feeds do but Yahoo search feeds do not.
There's still no alerts or feeds available for Google Image Search, probably because the index is so woefully behind the web at large.