I asked myself a funny question this week:

What was life like B.G. (BEFORE GOOGLE)?

I was thinking about this, because it seems as though Google has become a regular part of our everyday lives.  Some might argue that Facebook could boast of the same accomplishments, but I feel that Google plays a much more useful role than Facebook.

This week alone it helped me change headlight, find directions to a hockey arena my summer league plays at, make plans for a job fair our church is looking at hosting for our community, discover generally accepted vacation policies and even find a picture of an angry garden gnome.  All happened quite quickly too – fetching me something like 9,370,000 results in 0.27 seconds!

When everyone else is burning time surfing around Facebook, here are a few cool tips you might not have known about the big functionality of the little Google search box:

1. Get Weather updates. You can get weather reports by typing: ‘weather’ and then the Canadian postal code (NO hyphens) or USA zip code in question. Example: weather L8E6G1.

2. Track flight status. Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google’s search results.

3. Convert currency, temperature, metrics and more. Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many Canadian dollars there are to five dollars (5 USD in CAD). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) is also pretty useful.

4. Shipment tracking. You can Google tracking numbers for UPS, FedEx, and others just by entering the number (e.g. 1Z14662R0340419XXX). This avoids going through the log in and hassle of the individual shipping company site.

5. Get movie showing times in your local area. Just type in “movie times’ and your Canadian postal code (NO hyphens), or USA zip code. VOILA!

6. What time is it anywhere in the world? Ask Google. Enter simply enter ‘time’ and the name of the city to get the local time in big cities around the world.

Nothing much life-changing… but just a few fun tips today!

JJ