WebSiteForensics.com » Google tricks

From Google Reader to Twitter?

Mark MacKinnon — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:19:21 +0000

Want to publish more up to date tweets automatically from your Google News Reader? We’ve set up some great Google News Reader accounts for clients, but one of them wanted to know how she could have selected articles appear automatically in her twitter feed? Well, here’s the perfect article on the subject: How to Share Articles in Google Reader on Twitter.

In fact, we should be doing this!

Google Rankings

Mark MacKinnon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:42:13 +0000

One of the best Google analysis tools out there is GoogleRankings.com. All you need is your Google SOAP API Key. A word of caution: Google does not generate these keys anymore, so if you’re lucky you already have one, if not, we’re sorry.

Granted you have your Google SOAP API Key, you will be able to perform some deep searches for keywords and multiple domains, or mass keyword searches. Google Rankings is definitely one of our favorite tools for competition analysis and comparative ranking.

Using Google as a calculator : (1 + sqrt(5))/2

Mark MacKinnon — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:25:34 +0000

According to the basic Google cheat sheet, there are a just a few operators available to users. Yet Google accepts a much larger group of operators, let’s find out what they are. But before we do that, try the following link: (1 + sqrt(5))/2

Google’s Cheat Sheet

addition 45 + 39
subtraction 45 – 39
multiplication 45 * 39
division 45 / 39
percentage of 45% of 39
raise to a power 2^5

Roots, squares and cubes

By typing sqrt() with a positive integer, Google will calculate the value of the square root. Since Google offers the power operator, one could simply use 2^0.5 instead. Writing a cube root with such notation would be quite impractical.

Google also give the square root value by simply typing “square root of 4”.
Using this syntax, Google will also calculate “cube root”, “Nth root of”

e^(i*pi)

Google’s mathematical abilities are quite impressive, in fact you can use common constants like e, pi and i in all calculations.

All trigonometric operators are available as well but arguments are assumed to be in radians : sin, cos, tan, sec, csc, cot, arcsin, arccos, arctan, arccsc, sinh, cosh, tanh, csch, arsinh, arccsch

MCMLXVII in decimal

Google also does currency and unit conversions of mass, length, volume, area, time, electricity, power, energy and various numbering systems

Constants

Google also understands a number of physics constants from the speed of light to the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.

Using the government of Canada as a translator

Mark MacKinnon — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:55:38 +0000

If you are involved in bilingual projects, you may often encounter the need to translate a technical term. Despite the knowledge you may or may not have, there is always a word that will not be in your English/French dictionary nor appropriately available through Google’s language tools.

So here’s a technique you can use for very uncommon words that uses the translating abilities of Canadian federal translators. All Canadian web documents must be published in both languages. Therefore any word you are searching that has been used on any government of Canada page will have been translated by a trained professional, not a piece of software.

For instance, if you were looking for the French name of the Longhorned beetle, type this into Google:

“Longhorned beetle” site:gc.ca

Using “site:gc.ca” with Google will restrict searches to Government of Canada websites (gc.ca). Follow through to the page, locate the term “Longhorned beetle” and make a mental note of its position in the general layout: it might be in the title or the fifth paragraph down, third sentence.

Then, using the masthead of the website, click on “Français” to get the French language version of the page, locate the equivalent sentence using the mental note you made in the previous step, and there you are: Longhorned beetle in French is “Longicorne asiatique”.

Use this technique for any French to English, or English to French translation of a keyword, small phrase or difficult technical term !