55 Ways to Have Fun on Google

We’re currently checking out 55 Ways to Have Fun on Google, the latest compilation of tips and tricks from Google Blogoscoped’s author. It’s either $20 off Amazon or a free PDF download from the site. The book is distributed under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial) and we’re not exactly re-publishing here, but we’re taking the liberty to share some insights.

You probably use Google everyday, but do you know… the Google Snake Game? Googledromes? Memecodes? Googlesport? The Google Calculator? Googlepark and Google Weddings? Google hacking, fighting and rhyming? In this book, you’ll find Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun. Reading it, you won’t be the same searcher as before!

Of course, we’ve had our share of Google discoveries (and re-discoveries) here at Google Tutor. Who can forget our Voyeur Heaven article, or our universal Gmail inbox tip. There seems to be an infinite way to play with Google’s technology, whether it be search, messaging, hosting, location-based technologies, and what-have-you.

So here’s our take on some of the items on 55 Ways which we think are worth looking into.

Games

I would tend to think either the really geeky or the really bored people would go invent and play games for playing with Google. But some of these are quite interesting and would make for good exercises in using the search engine for various other purposes.

Google image game. This basically entails the player being presented 15 images for every round. It will then be the player’s task to correctly identify the search terms used to come about with that image.

Googlesports. Of course, this is just another term for those SEO contests, wherein a sponsor would run a contest to see who tops Google for a very obscure or downright meaningless keyword. They can be fun, but these contests can really get competitive, especially when money–and fame–gest involved.

Google search as a tool

Google calculator. Aside from the Desktop Gadgets calculator, you can also use Google’s search as a calculator of sorts. Simply keyin a string and get answers in the results pages. For instance, if you search for 20*3+8 you will get the answer:

How fun is that!

You can also use Google as for unit conversions. Searching for 37 celsius in fahrenheit, you get the following:

Isn’t that great?