Google Turns 8

Google is 8 years old.

Despite the much talked about Google outage yesterday (Northeast US complains of Google outages) in the Northeast (which turned out to be ISP DNS issues with Comcast users experiencing some of the outage as one of their DNS servers was down) we'd like to revisit an article published in our newsletter last year about All things Google. Google has released more features since then, but it's fun to look back.

Google - more than just search

Most of us use Google for our everyday searching. But did you know that Google offers more than just search? For example, it can be a calculator (type a numerical equation such as 2+2*5 into Google’s search box and it will come back with the correct answer).

Listed below are some of the more useful things that Google can do:

Dictionary - type “define” and the word you want to get the definition for. Example - define computer

Phonebook - to look up phone number, type the first name (or first initial), last name and city (state is optional). Example --- R. Abello Columbia. You can also perform a caller ID lookup by typing in the phone number including the area code.

Quick Facts - for fact-based questions such as population of a country, capital of a country or president of a country. Example - capital of the Philippines

FedEx , UPS and US Postal Service tracking numbers

Maps - enter a street address and Google will return with a link to a map.

Weather - type “weather” and the city, state. Example --- weather Baltimore MD

Language translation - available in German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Go to http://www.google.com/language_tools and you can enter a website you want translated from English or from another language. And you can also enter text and have it translated.

Technorati Tags: percworks, ezColumbia, Robin Abello, Columbia Maryland, Technology, Community, Google, Google 8th Birthday, Google Outage, Comcast