We spend a lot of time using Google products, whether the ubiquitous search engine, the "zeitgeisty" Zeitgeist or the fantastic Analytics package.

The beauty of Google’s products is in their simplicity. The search engine is less cluttered and more intuitive than any rival. Google desktop allows you to search your computer quickly and thoroughly with two taps of the CTRL key. Gmail has arguably the best spam filters on the market.

Beneath the surface, Google’s products have tremendous depth and a raft of features that you didn’t know were there. As they say about Othello, it takes “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master”.

Here is the first in a series of tips for some of our favourite Google products. We are starting with the seach engine.

Site Search

Looking for something specific within a site? You can search every cached page of a website by structuring a search like:

For this example, Google would show every instance of the word “tips” that occurs on www.upstreamconnections.com. This can be very useful if you are looking for a specific topic in a large website.

Super Stars

If you are suffering from memory loss, you can substitute a star (asterisk) symbol for any word in a phrase. For example:

The star acts like a joker or wildcard in a pack of playing cards.

Currency Conversion

Interested in watching the value of your Pounds Sterling plummet against every currency this side of Zimbabwe? Too lazy to visit XE.com? You can ask Google for a live currency conversion:

Google can provide thousands of different conversions, including length, mass, currency, time; basically most of the things we used to go to school for.

Definitions

The internet can be a confusing place. If you ever want to find out what a word means, you can ask Google to search its cache for definitions. For example: (click for bigger)

The quality of the definitions obviously relies on the quality of the source, but there is plenty to be learned from this tool. Have you come across any unusual results?