Google has had a huge impact on our culture and society because it changed the way things are done on the Internet. It is much more than the most used search engine on the Internet. Lets look at this extraordinary company in greater detail and give you some obscure tips to use this amazing search tool to its full potential. If you are like many people, you simply type a search term into the Google search box and scan the results page by page until you find either what you are looking for or a place to begin. There is much more you can do with this Internet search tool. Take a closer look.
Beginning with some background details, the company that has defined what searching the Internet means for many people was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. Google was first incorporated as a privately held corporation on September 7, 1998. Google's move to a publicly traded corporation took place on August 19, 2004. That IPO raised 1.67 billion dollars and made the company worth 23 billion dollars. Google initially began as a research project by Larry Page in January 1996. Sergey Brin joined Larry in his efforts. The two men believed that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites mean better results than techniques that looked at frequency of a search term on a page. Ad so, the company that could, did. Today, Google is a huge multinational effort. It has been consistently ranked by Fortune magazine number one as the "best place to work".
Google has got to its present position by recognizing what people wanted in their online experience and attempted to give it to them. Google's growth has been steady. Through a series of stages, Google has innovated and met challenges head on. They have a relaxed work environment, which focuses on new product development, key partnerships and alignments, environmental awareness and philanthropic ventures. One example of Google's efforts to be environmentally aware happened in 2006. In October of that year the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs.
Google is one of the few success stories to come out of the Internet crash of 2000 and they continue to innovate their services and products in the interest of their users. They are recognised as being the most popular and most important search engine on the Internet today. With this in mind, it's no wonder that hundreds of thousands of webmasters are constantly looking for ways to improve their search engine rankings on the service. Google is already displaying more images and video and they purchased "YouTube" service. When looked at in conjunction with other services they offer like maps and other online applications, the idea is that user's search experience will be fully catered for when they visit Google.
By sheer numbers of employees, Google also ranks high. As of June 30, 2008 its workforce boasted 19, 604 full time employees according to the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The same source also quotes another impressive statistic when it reports, "it is the largest American company by market capitalization that is not part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
All that preceded this demonstrates Google's beginnings, their rise to prominence and their importance to the economy. This relevance cannot be understated. It is clear that millions of businesses and end users make use of Google every day. They search, advertise, maintain essential online presences and are found both on the Internet and at physical "brick and mortar" locations because of Google. But Google is such a mammoth information source that chances are good that you can use it to do some pretty impressive things.
Let's look at more than ten uses for Google that you may not have discovered yet. Special thanks must be extended to the website 'Life Hacker" and "Kidtechguru" for some of the obscure tips given below. Google either of these sites for more detail and information. Think of the it as a bonus for those who actually read the article this far and thought I was only going to give you ten often unknown uses for Google. It is amazing that you can do all of these things with one online tool with more functionality being added all the time. Whatever you type in the search box, it is usually without quotes. Examples given include quotes just so they can be mire easily differentiated.
1. Get the local time for any area by typing Time plus the place name or zip code in the search box. For example: time Chicago will give you the current time in Chicago.
2. Track airline flight status. Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google's search results.
3. Google's powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out by converting anything you can think of to anything else. For example, type in: "5 USD in Euro" without the quotes to find out how many Euro dollars you get for five dollars U.S. Another example is "seconds in a year" or "quarter cup in teaspoons"
4. Compare items with "better than" and find similar items with "reminds me of" For example: "Better than WinAmp" or "Reminds me of Rush"
5. Use Google as a free proxy: What, your company blocks that hip new web site just because it drops the F bomb occasionally? Use Google's cache to take a peek even when the originating site's being blocked, with cache: name of site.com. For example cache: parishilton.com
6. When you're tired of seeing duplicate product search results from the places like eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, remove them out by stacking up the -site: (followed by the website you are trying to eliminate from the search results).
7. Find related terms and documents by adding a tilda to the end of a search term. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.
8. Using advanced operators that specify music files in an apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your own personal music search tool. For example: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana.
The above uses Nirvana as an example. Substitute whatever band interests you in the above search string.
9. ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search. Use Google image results to help you identify a foreign word or object by picture. Type the term into the Google image box to see what it is.
10. Use Google to help identify human faces in your searches. If you're doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don't want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google's Image search will do the trick. Add "&imgtype=face" (without the quotes) the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects.
11. Use Google to track packages for major delivery services like UPS, Fedex or the U.S. postal services just by typing the tracking number into the Google search box.
12. You can also get weather reports by typing: weather zipcode. Example: weather 14202 will give you the current weather conditions in Buffalo, New York.
13. If you know the currency codes like USD, AUD, RMB, YEN, etc, just type "10 USD in AUD". The "in" is actually needed. Xe.com provides a nice listing of the currency codes for each country. Example 20 USD in YEN
14. For movies, type in the movie name followed by the zip code you are in - handier than a newspaper!
15. You can also use Google as a dictionary. Just type in spell: word where word is whatever word you want to check the spelling of.
So there you have it, some background information on the company that redefined how people search for information on the Internet, some of their innovative practices which stem from a relevant, now, "hip" mentality. Google strives to give people what they want in a form that is intuitive and accessible to them. The same forward thinking also applies to their advertising programs like "Google AdWords" and "Google AdSense", and while these are beyond the scope of this article, like everything else with Google, these succeed because of how different they are from traditional advertising models.
Google is an amazing company, tremendous success story and a cultural icon synonymous with search and pushing the envelope beyond expected norms. No wonder they are a worldwide company worth billions of dollars with no sign of slowing down. Go Google.

Thank you for your interest in my article. To read other articles I have written, you can search for them under my name Steven Milbrandt. Please also visit [http://www.learncomputers2day.com] and http://www.sunseeker.cbpirateblog.com Have a good day.

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