COMM 260, Principles of Internet Web-Based Design
Instructor: Ross Collins

Find stuff on the net

For users like us who are looking for more.

Everyone seems to be saying nowadays that their favorite search engine is Google. It's become a verb! Soon to be part of your Funk and Wagnalls! (Perhaps. Do they still make the F & W? Search it out yourself.)

But most of us may not be aware that Google can do lots of things beyond "googling," as we say, and beyond Froogle, the low-price shopper comparison. For example:

Phone book:

Type name of person or business, city and state, or zip code. Hypothetical example: Irving Nern, Gackle, ND.

Yellow pages:

Type kind of business you're looking for, city and state. Hypothetical example: Goth clothing shops, Fargo, ND.

Find a name from a phone number scrawled on the outhouse wall:

Type phone number, with area code. Hypothetical exa...well, you can figure these out.

Free calculator:

type numbers separated by +, -, * or /.

Free dictionary:

Type define: and then the word.

Alternatives are good
Google wants to be your everything. But as mama told me (more or less), you'd better check out other possibilities. For example, Vivisimo categorizes search results, a big time-saver, instead of Google's throwing lists at you. Bonus! You can search E-Bay a lot faster than actually searching E-Bay. (What's that all about?) Dogpile runs your query through other search engines ("metasearch") to pick out the best of the best. It also finds audio or multimedia files, a reach beyond even Google's famously-pixel-stained hands. And then there's the Pile's cuter-than-heck fetching dog icon. What's not to like?

(Source: Macworld magazine, December 2004.)

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