Doing math (and more) in Google Saturday, 27 May 2006 2:15 pm
Posted by Dongmei in What's new at Google?!, featured IT of the week, search engines.add a comment
When I gave the presentation (see my post on this) to Amy's Math Research Group, I noticed the students don't know much about many functions that Google search provide except keywords search, so decide to blog a bit about these tips, such as:
calculator function: e.g. type "1245^3" (without the quotes) in the search box, you'll get the answer in no time. For more about the calculator function, check out this on Google Help Center, or the complete instruction.
units conversion: Those of us that are familiar with the metric system (SI) would go nuts with the units such as inches, gallons. With Google, it's easy. For example, type "5 inches in cm", you'll get
 |
5 inches = 12.7 centimeters |
in less than 1/2 second.
number search: You can type specific numbers (patent number, FedEx tracking number, etc.) in Google's search box. If you type FedEx tracking number, you'll get the latest info on the package that you're tracking (cool, yeah?).
site search: say you're search something related to CofC but found the college's website search just doesn't work that well, you can add "site:cofc.edu" (without the quotes) after your search terms. You can also use this to do domain search, say add "site:gov" to your search will find only those government sites that related to your topic.
Here's a one-page cheat sheet "Better searches, Better results" that you may find useful.
Also remember, as almost any other search engine, Google has an Advanced Search interface that would serve many of these advanced search features and more (and you don't have to memorize these techniques!).
Google Gadgets, and the latest version of Google Desktop Thursday, 11 May 2006 3:52 pm
Posted by Dongmei in What's new at Google?!.4 comments
Yesterday Google released its newest version of Google Desktop, and introduced the exciting news of Google Gadgets. So now, besides searching your desktop, you can integrate these cool G Gadgets, visually appealing mini-applications like clocks, weather globes, etc. (search tools, games, media players … ) to your desktop.
My favorites? The Weather Globe (choose your city, view weather data for 4 days, with some cool animation effects), the Scratch Pad (if you have any ideas, just start writing on the desktop, and it will automatically save for you, you can choose to save as a file on your pc too), the Battery Meter (stay alert by checking your computer’s battery power with one glance, with an icon shows whether you’re plugged in or not, this is esp. useful if you're using a laptop).
You can choose to dock all (or some) your G Gadgets on the sidebar, or undock them and move them anywhere on your desktop, simply click on the pull-down arrow on the gadgets. If you get annoyed by the "sidebar", switch to the "floating deskbar" mode or the "deskbar" mode that sits in your Window's taskbar, click on the "gadgets" icon in the taskbar will toggle the undocked gadgets on or off your desktop. If you have a Google Account, you can even save your Google Gadget content and settings across multiple computers running Google Desktop (click here to find how).
View all new features of Google Desktop.
Read the announcement on the Inside Google Desktop blog.
hack Google Maps to find your library’s (or any location’s) latitude and longitude Thursday, 4 May 2006 5:11 pm
Posted by Dongmei in API, Web 2.0, What's new at Google?!, featured IT of the week.3 comments
While playing with Google Maps and trying to incorporate Gmaps on my web site (or my blog), but no success so far, however, learned a new trick to find out a location's geocoding (you do need to know the physical address), here's how:
- go to Google Local (Google Maps: http://maps.google.com)
- enter the address you want to search in the search box
- click and hold on the map and move it just slightly (a few pixels if you can manage it), then release
- click “Link to this page” in the upper right hand corner, look in the address bar (URL), you should see &ll=xx.xxxxxx, xx.xxxxxx
- everything that follows &ll= is your Lat & Long (Lat, then Long separated by a comma).
e.g. for Addlestone Library: 205 Calhoun St., Charleston, SC 29424
using the steps above, you'll find its
Lat (latitude) = 32.793408
Long (longitude) = -79.940386
Cool, huh?
Google Calendar, and its Web 2.0 potential Wednesday, 19 April 2006 8:56 pm
Posted by Dongmei in Web 2.0, What's new at Google?!, featured IT of the week, free/Open Source Software.add a comment
We all know that Yahoo calendar is the leading service in this category.
Google has launched Google Calendar beta (GC), you may share it w/ friends, colleagues and the like, or keep it private (default), or you may open it up for every one (esp. helpful if you have a business like an art gallery, theatre, book club, or a library). The GC service will also recognise events w/i the text of Gmail messages and flag them, so you may add them into your GC instantly.
Color coding helps to keep different things (home, office, art, concerts, vacation, etc.) straight, you can also add different holiday calendars (e.g. US Holidays, China Holidays).
It lets you quickly add an event, and view multiple calendars w/i one screen. Similar to Outlook and Evite, Google Calendar beta lets you send invitations to anyone — even to people who don't use Gmail. Event reminders, including SMS updates, will surely keep you on your toes.
GC lets you import calendars from MS Outlook, and Mac fans will love it since it syncs w/ iCal.
You can export your schedule via RSS, and then read the feeds from a third-party newsreader.
Its unclutered interface, Web 2.0 potential, together w/ Google's powerful search capability, I think you'll like it.
For its Web 2.0 potential, read Google Calendar API + GC's Web 2.0 Potential on Search Engine Lowdown.
Reference Linking in JSTOR; search JSTOR content in Google and Google Scholar Wednesday, 1 March 2006 8:48 pm
Posted by Dongmei in What's new at Google?!, database features, databases.1 comment so far
Reference Linking in JSTOR
Yesterday, JSTOR announced its official release of reference linking functionality. Reference linking enables JSTOR users to follow a link from a reference in an article directly to the cited article. (A feature should be familiar for the open Web users). At this time, the reference linking capability is internal – links are currently available only between journals archived in JSTOR. Approximately 18,000 links are currently available from a small number of journals, and JSTOR expects to complete retrospective reference capture for all current holdings in 2007.
For more details about reference linking, check out http://www.jstor.org/help/reference.linking.htmlJSTOR Crawl Site Update
Google (not surprising!) is the first search engine company that signed a license agreement with JSTOR and is allowed to crawl and index the scholarly literature in the archive. The crawl site contains the full-text or optical character recognition (OCR) files for the majority of journals participating in JSTOR. More than 2 million of the full-length articles and book reviews archived by JSTOR are searchable in both Google and Google Scholar.
