Google is great at burying powerful features in its deceptively simple applications and tools. Search, Docs, Gmail — if you’re like millions of others around the world, you use at least one of these tools on a daily basis. What features are you missing? Read on to learn about a few.
Search
You’re probably working too hard when you use Google’s search engine. First, if you regularly conduct a search for a specific topic or term, let Google do the work for you. Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts) allows you to schedule a search for a specific term or concept and have the search results sent directly to you. You can determine the type of search results that are sent to you, the frequency, and even the quality. Results can be sent either to one of your email addresses or to a feed. The Alerts service is perfect for those who conduct daily searches, say, for the latest sports news or scores. And once your alerts are set up, it’s easy to manage them or remove them if they’re no longer useful to you.
When you do have to use Google the old-fashioned way, avail yourself of the productivity-enhancing features of Google’s keyboard shortcuts enhancement, part of Google Labs’ “experimental search” project. You can activate keyboard shortcuts simply by visiting http://www.google.com/experimental and clicking “Join this experiment” under the “Keyboard shortcuts” heading.
Once you do, your keyboard will take on new life when you’re using Google. You’ll be able to move from one search result to the next simply by pressing the letter J on your keyboard, and pressing O or Enter will open the currently selected result. The forward slash (/) character will move you back to the search box from any position, and the Esc key will take the cursor out of the search box….