Thing 11. All About Google

Btw, the link to Google features on the MILI site is dead. I had to access the Google features throught he Google home page. I first checked out the "book Search" feature and searched "books about minnesota". The search returned over two million items. I clicked on a Library of Congress web site and discovered "The Learning Page: collection conections" and found a collection of 138 digitized books in "Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin ca. 1820-1910. There are three sections in the collection: U.S. History, Critical Thinking, and Arts & Humanities. What a treasure trove of resources! The calculator feature is a nice touch that a social studies teacher like me will utilize on a regular basis. Pretty depressing checking out the currency conversion feature. Why? Today, one U.S. dollar is worth .68 euro. Smart investors have been buying euros for several years, and European vacations are becoming prohibitively expensive. The definitions feature is great for all learners, teachers and students, alike. The file type feature aids one in finding documents in a specific form, e.g. pdf files. As a semi-retired disc jockey I used the product search for "technics turntables". The first site was for Dinkytown's legendary "The Needle Doctor"--a turntable, etc. shop without peer in the upper midwest, if not the world. I used the Googel groups feature to search for some arcane items--Minneapolis Laker memorabilia. To my pleasant surprise the search uncovered over eight hundred sites. The I'm feeling lucky feature took me directly to the website of my alma mater, Grinnell College. Very nice. The image search feature oncovered more than two million sites for the object of my query: Iraq War pictures. Btw, the first site had a totally gruesome picture of a casualty, so be careful! The local search feature was another winner, as the object of my search was my old home Chicago and "italian beef sandwiches". The first restaurant mentioned in the search is arguably the home of the best Chicago-style italian beef--Al's #1 in the Little Italy neighborhood on Chicago's near west side. The movie search feature is another nice touch. I used the music search for a friend's band, the Dillinger Four. The first site was the band's home page. For the news headlines feature I entered "Iowa caucuses" and was taken to over six hundred thousand sites. Wow! The first article was a brief history of the Iowa caucuses recently published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (the paper of record in the deep south). Another nice feature is Q&A. My query was the population of Brazil and within 0.2 seconds, I found a site that said as of June 2006, Brazil's population was 201,765, 543. If you wanted to avoid Wikipedia, the third site was the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Their population estimate was more than almost twenty thousand less--185,308,371 as of January 2, 2008. Interesting anomaly. I was already familiar with the refine your search feature. Very useful. I am not a big fan of the prefetching feature and I have disabled this feature on my home browser. I do not care for something that assumes it knows exactly where I want to go after I have typed two or three letters into the search box. Search by number is useful, but I tend to search for USPS packages, for example, at the USPS site. For the site search feature, I queried the admission site for www.hamline.edu amd was taken immediately to the site. Very nice. The street map feature took me to a thumbnail map of my home address, immediately. The travel and weather features are very useful for travelers. All in all, the extra Google features are very helpful and I am glad I am aware of all of them. Next, I checked out some of the special search features from Google. I used the U.S. Government special search for copyright and was taken immediately to the U.S. Copyright Office. Very useful. I have created a Google Alert for "copyright law" and will report back tomorrow afternoon to see how it worked. I used the book search feature to find books concerning the Minneapolis Lakers (I am a collector of Mpls Lakers books) and I found a book that never knew existed. Wow! There are three copies of the book in the Twin Cities--the Minneapolis Public Library, the St. Paul Public Library, and Minnesota Historical Society (thank you Google!). I need to work more with Google Scholar--more specific search terms. My initial attempts to use this feature were unacceptable. I mentioned Google Docs in an earlier post and will let those comments suffice for now. Yes, I do love Google and these new discoveries have opened a whole new search world for me. drfaust