Google is a tool we all use every day. However not everyone knows that there are many other functions it can perform other than the basic search we all know and love. Here are a select few which the Pro Drive team like to use – we hope you find them useful too!

Find specific information in a website you know

If you need to find some information within a website, but there was not a search bar in that website, google can do this for you. So if you wanted to find ‘Support Services’ on the Pro Drive website you would type:

site:www.prodriveit.co.uk ‘support services’

Find specific file types while searching

Are you looking for a certain file type when you search rather than a web page? Perhaps you are looking for an Acrobat document – often this can be incredibly difficult to find as your search will return many web pages. Try searching by the file type (last three letters) to narrow the search so for example to find PDF documents on Microsoft
filetype:PDF microsoft

Find similar pages to the ones you enjoy

If you like a specific site and want to find similar ones you can save yourself the time and have Google do it for you. Type “related:” before your search terms to find similar page. To find pages similar to the BBC website type:
related: http://www.bbc.co.uk

Search for items similar to an image you have

If you have an image and you would like to search for similar ones on the internet, you can use google images to do this. Just go to the following URL (http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en), upload an image and Google will scour the internet for similar pictures

Use Google to calculate for you

Google can make calculations for you for example you can type in equations like 5*5 or 10-3 in the search bar, press enter and then Google will return immediately with the solution. You can also use it to convert units of measurement for example by typing ‘convert 5 ft to metres’ returns 1.524 metres.

If you are interested in doing more with Google then get in touch – we have some more tips we can share!