If you don’t have the screen room for the Google toolbar (or one of its imitators), or if your browser of choice came out during the Carter administration and doesn’t accommodate a search box, Google’s browser buttons can be a good way to run searches without jumping to the home page.

The browser buttons, shown in Figure 7-1, are simply links that you can place on the same toolbar that holds your most frequently used bookmarks (also known as “favorites”).

Figure 7-1. Google’s browser buttons sit right on your Links toolbar (called the Personal toolbar in Netscape and Mozilla). Obviously, if you don’t normally keep a toolbar open for your bookmarks, these buttons don’t save you any screen space.

The buttons come in two flavors, and you can install either or both of them:

The buttons work with pretty much any browser made in the last five years:

If you click over to www.google.com/options/buttons.html and click Get Your Google Buttons Here, Google detects the kind of browser you’re using and gives you appropriate instructions for installing the buttons—which takes less time than blinking an eye.

In some browsers, you can open a sidebar, like the one shown in Figure 7-2, and run searches from there. When you click a link in the sidebar, the new page appears in the main window. A search sidebar is useful primarily because it can retain the list of results links—saving you the trouble of clicking back over to your results page when you want to explore more than one result.

Figure 7-2. Left: The sidebar is a separate pane within your browser that lets you run Google searches without leaving the page you’re on. Right: Here, the results of the search appear in the sidebar only. You can also arrange it so that the results show up in the main window—which means you also get the full Google info for each page in the list. To clear the search box and results, click New in the sidebar (above the Google logo).

Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla all have search sidebars. Here’s how they work.

Internet Explorer for Macintosh

Setting up a Google sidebar in Internet Explorer for the Mac is a big win because you can’t get a Google toolbar for this browser. But the sidebar solution involves a twist, because the existing search sidebar doesn’t let you use Google. Instead, you have to use the Page Holder sidebar, shown in Figure 7-3. The Page Holder feature anchors a single Web page—in this case the Google home page—in the browser’s sidebar. When you click a link inside the sidebar, the new page opens in the browser’s main window.

Note

Actually, if you’re in a geeky mood, you might be able to hack Internet Explorer for the Mac to run Google searches from the search sidebar; www.visakopu.net/ie5google/ gives directions. But if you harbor no hackerish impulses, the Page Holder workaround is a good bet.

You can run Google searches from the Page Holder sidebar two different ways. If the page you hold in the sidebar is the Google home page (Figure 7-3, top), your results appear in the main window only. If the page you hold is a special search-box page from Google (Figure 7-3, bottom), however, your first page of results appears in the sidebar only, and it includes no details—though if you mouse over a link, a box appears and shows you the page snippet you’d see in a regular results listing.

Figure 7-3. Top: If you’re holding the Google home page, you’ll notice right away that it doesn’t fit in the sidebar. You can, however, widen the sidebar. Mouse over the line just to the left of the sidebar tabs, until the cursor becomes a double-headed arrow. Then drag the line as far right as you want. Bottom: You can do the same trick if you’re holding the special Google search pane, but it fits reasonably in a narrower pane, too.

This Page Holder option, though, is helpful if you want to click through your first few results and view each page in the main window.

Here’s how to set up Page Holder to run Google searches:

1. Open Page Holder.

   Internet Explorer calls the whole sidebar the Explorer Bar, and you can open it by pressing ⌘-T (or by choosing View → Explorer Bar). The bar has five tabs running along its right edge, and Page Holder is the bottom one. Click it to get the blank bar shown in Figure 7-4.

   

   Figure 7-4. Practically nobody knows how to use the Page Holder feature, but it’s a great trick if you’re wedded to Internet Explorer for the Mac.

2. Open the page you want to preserve.

   You have two choices here. You can hold the main Google home page by pointing your browser to www.google.com. (Searching from the home page opens your results in the main window only, as shown in Figure 7-3 at top.)

   Or you can hold the special Google search pane, shown at bottom in Figure 7-3, by going to www.google.com/ie. (Searching from this search bar opens your first page of results in the sidebar only, as shown in Figure 7-3 at bottom. When you want to see results beyond the first ten, the sidebar gives you a Next link, but clicking it makes your results from 11 on appear in the main window. As in Internet Explorer for Windows, there’s no way to run a search from the sidebar that displays your results in both windows.)

   Note

   You can create bookmarks within Page Holder for any page—and change it later, if you like. Just pick a page for now, and you can follow this procedure again to save the other.

3. Add the open page to Page Holder.

   You can either click Add at the top of the Page Holder window, or you can find the @ icon in the address bar, to the left of the URL, and drag it into the Page Holder pane.

4. To save the page so you can easily return to it any time, click Favorites → Add to Page Holder Favorites.

   Once you save it, the Google home page goes by the name Google; the search page goes by the name Google Results.

   That’s it. You can now run a search from the sidebar and feel like you beat the system.

FOR MACINTOSH ONLY: The Google Service

In Mac OS X, every program has a feature called Services, which are extra, general-purpose tools that let you do things like send emails from within a program and add sticky notes. You can find these services in the Application menu—the menu that bears the name of whatever program you’re using. The Services menu has a submenu with a list of options like Make New Sticky Note and Mail → Send to.

When you highlight some text in nearly any program, you can perform these Services on your selection. Thus, if you highlight a URL, and choose Application → Services → Make New Sticky Note, a new sticky with your URL appears.

The good news is that Search with Google (Shift-⌘-L) is also in the Services menu. The bad news is that Services don’t work with all programs. In fact, they’re mostly limited to applications that were written specifically for Mac OS X (known as Cocoa applications), which include programs like iChat, Safari, Mail, and TextEdit.

Quicker than using the Services menu, though, is running the Search in Google command from a program’s shortcut menu. While typing in a Cocoa program, you can simply right-click (or Control-click) a selection of text and choose Search in Google. In a flash, your Web browser opens and performs the corresponding Google search.

Netscape and Mozilla (Mac, Windows, and Linux)

Netscape and Mozilla act pretty much the same when it comes to searching Google from a sidebar. You can use the existing Search sidebar and simply choose Google as your search engine (which works just like the sidebar for Internet Explorer for Windows shown in Figure 7-2). Or you can download a special sidebar from Google that lets you perform a Lucky search and reach Google’s alternate collections (Images, Groups, Directory, and News). The special Google search is worth using only if you often look for things in the alternate collections—or if you’re often Feeling Lucky.

With either sidebar, Mozilla and Netscape share the useful feature of listing links to your results in the sidebar and opening the full Google results page in the main window. This setup is handy when you want to take a gander at all the details in a results listing (main window) but then need only the links to surf around (sidebar).

To open the sidebar, choose View → Show/Hide → Sidebar (or My Sidebar, in Netscape). On Windows machines, you can also open and close the sidebar by pressing F9. If the sidebar has something other than a search box showing (like a history of your browsing), click the tab for Search (which might be at the bottom of the sidebar).

In addition to the blank search box, the Search tab includes a menu labeled “using” that lets you choose your favorite search engine. If you don’t see Google on the list, choose Edit → Preferences (on the Mac, chose Mozilla [or Netscape] → Preferences); in the window that opens, click the plus sign (or flippy triangle) next to Navigator, and then choose Internet Search. At the top of the Internet Search page is a section for Default Search Engine. Use the “Search using” menu to pick Google, and then click OK. Voilà—you’re now ready to run searches from the sidebar.

Tip

You can leave the Search sidebar open but actually run searches from the Google toolbar. The advantage of this system is that you get the search flexibility of the toolbar (Section 6.1), but you wind up with a list of results links in the sidebar. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you want to use the special Google-only sidebar, described above and shown in Figure 7-5, head over to www.google.com/mozilla/google-search.html and scroll down to “Install a new Google sidebar panel.” When you click the link for your version of Netscape or Mozilla, the sidebar installs instantly, and you can begin using it right away.

Tip

Don’t overlook the What’s Related tab in the Mozilla and Netscape sidebar. Like the “Similar pages” link in a Google result, it shows a list of pages somehow related to the page you’re currently viewing. Even better, the tab provides contact information for the site’s owners (when available), so you can compliment (or insult) them about their Web design.

Figure 7-5. The Google sidebar is handy if you often search Google Images, Groups, Directory, or News. Here, the sidebar shows a search for Mister Rogers in Google’s image bank. A nice bonus of this sidebar is that you can run Lucky Image searches—meaning that Google takes you directly to the first image, rather than showing you the entire list.

In Internet Explorer for Windows, and Netscape or Mozilla for any operating system, you can use your address bar (the place where URLs appear) as a blank Google search box. This trick is quite practical; since almost everyone keeps the address bar visible, being able to search from it doesn’t add any gunk to your browser window.

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Windows 2000 and XP users can download a free copy of Google Desktop Search at http://desktop.google.com. When you first install the program, it takes some time to index all the files on your computers (Figure 7-7), but works quietly in the background so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing. You will need to close and reopen your email program after you install the program, though, so it can index your messages.

Figure 7-7. After you first install the program, Google Desktop Search takes time to get to know your hard drive by making a record of its contents during the indexing procedure. The first indexing session is by far the slowest.

Google Desktop Search uses your computer’s idle time to do its indexing and cache work, borrowing some processor power whenever the computer sits for more than 30 seconds without doing anything. The program can take anywhere between 15 minutes and several hours to index your whole drive, depending on the size of files, the number of files, and the time your PC has to spare. As you create and download new files later, Google Desktop Search makes note of them and adds them to the cache automatically.

Once your computer is fully indexed, you’ll see a Desktop link above the Search box whenever you visit the Google home page; click that link to go searching through your computer’s contents.

You can also use Desktop Search by entering keywords in the Desktop Search deskbar, down in the Windows taskbar area. As shown in Figure 7-8, the Search deskbar toggles back and forth so you can look for stuff on the desktop or on the Web from the same spot. If you select the More menu, you can switch to a groovy, ungrounded deskbar that hangs out on whatever part of your screen you want and floats around all your open windows.

Figure 7-8. Top: You can search your desktop (or the Web itself) from one of two convenient locations. If you like the grounded feeling of the taskbar, leave the Desktop Search box down where you can find it. Click the black triangle to see the menu of options. You can switch to a floating deskbar under the More menu. Bottom: If you choose the floating desktop search bar, you can search your desktop or the Web from the wee window that floats about your open programs.

You search with Google Desktop Search in the same way you search for anything else with a Google service: Type your terms into the Search box, and then hit the Enter key. When you search your desktop, however, you get results that show your highlighted terms along with the files’ locations around your PC, so you can easily see what folder or drive the file lives in. (You may even find folders you forgot existed.) Google Desktop Search displays the results either by relevance or by date; click the link on the right side of the page to suit your fancy.

On the results page, there’s an icon next to each item that tells you what kind of file it is. A musical note indicates it’s a music file, an envelope means it’s an email message, and so on. You’ll also find familiar icons for Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDF files, and America Online’s little yellow running androgyne. Google Desktop Search displays thumbnail images of Web pages, digital photos, and other image files that wash up in the results, too, so you have a visual clue right there without opening the actual file. When you click a link on the results page, the file pops open.

Clicking the link for a Web page takes you right to it in your browser. If the current Web page is newer than the one you remember seeing in your surfing sessions, you can see an older version of the page by clicking the “cached” link in the last line of the result’s description, as shown in Figure 7-9.

Clicking the title of a file—like a Word document or JPEG image—opens the most recent version of the file in the program you normally use to open such files. Old email messages show up on the results page with keywords highlighted within the text, and you have the option to open or reply to the original message in your regular email program with one click.

Figure 7-9. Not only do you get thumbnail images of Web pages and photos stored on your hard drive, but Desktop Search lets you go back in time to look at older cached versions of Web pages as well. The links at the top of the results page let you sort your results by type: emails, files, Web pages, or chats.

If you like having Google Desktop Search around to help you track down most of your stuff, but don’t want it to index every little thing, you can temporarily turn off the service—or shut it down altogether—without having to uninstall it from your computer. This can be helpful if, say, you want to pop over to a florist’s Web site and order flowers for your beloved from the family computer without leaving a trail in the Desktop Search cache.

To have Desktop Search stop indexing and caching everything in sight for the next 15 minutes, click the icon that looks like a rainbow pretzel in the Windows system tray, and then select Pause Indexing from the menu, as shown in Figure 7-11. (You can also get to this menu item by clicking the black triangle next to the anchored or floating deskbar on your screen.) When you get close to the end of the 15 minutes, a taskbar message balloon floats up and warns that you’re down to your last minute before indexing and caching begin again.

Figure 7-11. If you want to do some work without Google Desktop recording your every move, click its icon in the Windows system tray and select Pause Indexing for 15 minutes of unmonitored action.

If you get done with your secret mission before the 15 minutes are up, you can get Google Desktop indexing again by returning to the same taskbar menu and choosing “Resume Indexing.” Need a bit more time? You can also select “Pause for 15 More Minutes.”

Shutting down Google Desktop Search for the duration of your computer session is as easy as quitting any other program on your computer: just bop back to the taskbar menu and choose Exit. Quitting entirely out of Desktop Search means no indexing, caching, or searching the PC, however.

You can then turn Desktop Search back on in two different ways:

If you decide that you don’t want Google Desktop Search in your life after all, uninstall the software by choosing Start → Programs → Google Desktop Search → Uninstall Google Desktop Search.

You can find the deskbar at http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/. All you have to do to get it on your computer is click Download Google Deskbar and then choose Open or Save. If you choose Open, an installation wizard opens directly. If you choose Save, the installer downloads to your hard drive, and then a dialog box pops up asking if you want to open the file; choose Open to bring up the installation wizard.

The wizard asks if you agree to Google’s terms of use (say yes, or else you can’t install the deskbar), and then it asks if you want to send feedback statistics to Google about the way you use the toolbar. The screen explains what information Google does and doesn’t collect. Leaving the setting on (or not) is your choice—the deskbar works the same either way. Finally, it instructs you to right-click in your Windows taskbar (the band at the bottom of the screen) and choose Toolbars → Google Deskbar. That’s it.

If you feel like it, you can make the deskbar wider or narrower. Just mouse over the vertical bar to the left of the search box, and when it becomes a two-headed arrow, drag it left or right. (If no two-headed arrow appears, right-click the taskbar and make sure “Lock the Taskbar” is turned off.) If you move the bar all the way left, it drops down and forms a whole new row on the taskbar, which gives your other buttons more breathing room on the regular taskbar.

The most obvious way get to the deskbar is to click in it and start typing. But the fastest way to get there is via the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+G. You can also search from the deskbar using any of the following methods:

In addition to running standard Google searches, the deskbar lets you do a bunch of other nifty stuff—like getting definitions and stock quotes—all from the arrow button on the right end of the search box, just to the right of the googly-eyed button. Figure 7-13 shows the menu you get when you click the arrow.

Figure 7-13. You can use this button to get at movie reviews, software downloads, and a slew of Google’s alternative searches, like News and Groups. But for the searches you perform regularly, the keyboard shortcuts are a lot faster.

Most of the time, when you perform a search using the deskbar, your results appear in what Google calls the mini-viewer (Figure 7-12, bottom).

This small window is a big boon because it lets you run searches with your browser closed, which saves memory, screen space, and general clicking. You can surf around in the viewer as you would in a regular browser window; when you click outside the window, it slides shut.

If you couldn’t change a bunch of settings, most software would be about as much fun as a box of gray crayons. Happily, the Google Deskbar is flexible. For example, you can change the font size of the mini-viewer’s display, add your own custom searches, and change the way the mini-viewer appears and disappears.

To reach the settings window shown in Figure 7-14, right-click the googly-eyed button on the right end of the deskbar, and then choose Google Deskbar Options.

Most of the options are self-explanatory, but here are a few you might not expect:

The Customized Searches tab sounds straightforward, but requires some explanation. Google has a handful of special search types already set up: stock quotes, a thesaurus, movie reviews, and software downloads. Each custom search runs your query on a particular Web site (movie reviews, for example, run your search on RottenTomatoes.com). Most specialized searches have a keyboard shortcut, too (Ctrl+T to search an online thesaurus, for instance), and they all get a listing in the deskbar menu (click the arrow on the right end of the search box).

Customized Searches lets you change the existing searches or add new ones. You might want to change one if, say, you prefer a stock-quote service other than Google’s. Or you might want to add one if there’s a site you search often (like AltaVista or your company’s intranet), and you want to be able to reach it from the deskbar.

Here’s the hard part: You have to know the URL for the search you want to add. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the URL for the site in question but the string that runs a search on that site. For example, the stock-quote URL is http://www.google.com/search?q=stocks:{1}, and the movie-review URL is http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/movie.php?searchby=movies&search={1}. Worse, Web sites all use different systems for creating that search URL. If you aren’t a Webmaster and you don’t know the search URL for a site you’d like to add, your only hope is to play around and try to hit on the right string.

Once you have the URL you need, head to Customize Searches, and click Edit to change an existing search or Add to create a new one. If you’re editing a search, all you have to do is replace the existing URL and then click OK twice. If you’re adding a new one, you need to name it and then add the URL. You can also try assigning a keyboard shortcut to your new search, but Google only gives you the option to use Ctrl plus one other key, and, frustratingly, most Ctrl+key combinations are already taken. Click OK twice to finish. To use your new search, type some keywords into the deskbar, click the arrow button on the right to get a menu of options, and then choose your special search from the list.

Google works hard to deliver highly relevant search results. But, of course, sometimes Google guesses wrong because what’s relevant to Jane Searcher may not be relevant to you. To help it find pages that are more likely to be of interest to you, try Google’s Personalized Web search.

Google Personalized (http://labs.google.com/personalized) lets you tell Google what topics generally interest you. Then, when you run a search, Google displays the regular results but gives you the choice of seeing them rearranged according to your preset preferences. Figure 7-15 has an example.

To set your topics, head to http://labs.google.com/personalized and click Create Profile. Click any of the categories to get a list of subcategories you can designate (Figure 7-16).

Figure 7-15. Top: When you run a search in Google Personalized, it first displays the same results you’d see by running a regular Google search. But in the upper-left corner of the screen, if you drag the slider to the right, Google brings to the top of the list any results that match your topics of interest. Bottom: Here, the topic Publishing & Printing brought up the top two listings. You can tell which results are personalized because Google marks them with three colored balls.

Figure 7-16. Turn on subcategories that interest you. You can select as many as you want in every category that intrigues you. If you want to select an entire category, click the General choice (for example, “Recreation [General].”)

When you’re done adding categories, click Start Searching. If you want to add or delete categories at any time, just click Edit Profile from any Google Personalized page. The list on the left lets you remove existing categories; the list on the right is the same one you saw when you first set up your categories, and you can dive back into it for additional choices.

When Google first crashed the search engine party back in the 1998, many people noticed how plain its home page was, especially in the era of Day-Glo background colors, flashing banner ads, and the screeching jumble of links that adorned most of the competition’s portal pages. For many years, the simple white background and search box remained just the way they’d always been whenever you hit up Google for some information.

While it hasn’t gone whole hog in tarting up the old home page, Google is experimenting with letting you add a few helpful elements yourself. With its Personalize Your Homepage tool in Google Labs, you can customize the standard Google search page to your liking by adding things like stock tickers, weather reports, and news headlines from a variety of sources. You can also add helpful shortcuts, like a preview of your Gmail Inbox (Section 11.1.2), driving directions from Google Maps (Section 3.3.2), and movie times for the theaters in your area. Figure 7-17 shows an example of what a personalized Google page looks like.

Figure 7-17. Let’s face it: You spend enough of your Web time on Google’s home page, anyway, so you might as well jazz it up with other helpful information like the latest news and weather updates.

To personalize your page, you need just a few things, including a Google Account (you can use your Gmail, Google Groups, or Froogle Shopping List user name and password here) and the most up-to-date version of your favorite Web browser for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Then you need to surf on over to www.google.com/ig and click the link in the upper-left corner marked Add Content.

The next screen lets you click various buttons to add content to your home page: a preview of your waiting Gmail messages, tidbits from Google News, Quotes of the Day, and so on. If you want the weather in your area, click the “edit” link in the Weather box and fill in your Zip code. When you’ve picked what you want, click the “close” button.

If you’re not logged in to a Google service, you’ll get pestered to sign in with your Google Account name and password. If you don’t have an account, you’re presented with a link to join up right there. Once you’re signed up, signed in, and set to go, Google presents you with your customized creation.

You can rearrange the elements on the page by dragging and dropping them into an order that suits you. For example, if you always want the weather forecast and stock report right up front where you can see them, hover the mouse cursor over the section title until it turns into a cross, and then drag the weather box or stock section to the part of the page where you’d like to see it each time you visit Google.

You still have your beloved Google search box on the top half of the page now, but the lower half holds all your additions and customizations. (If you ever want to return to the plain-old Google home page, sans any of your decorations, click Classic Home in the upper-right corner.)

When you get the page just so and want to see it every time you’re in Google mode, just paste its URL into the area of your browser’s options or preferences where you tell it your home page.

If you’re on the road and away from your usual computer, you can still get to your custom page by popping over to www.google.com/ig and typing in your Google name and password. If you’re using somebody else’s computer, though, make sure you sign out of your Google account before you take off, since the next person who comes along to Google something will get an eyeful of your personalized page—including your stock tickers and Gmail message previews. Unless you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, then, click the Sign Out link at the top of the page before you leave.

Have you ever spent some quality time with Google and found exactly what you were looking for—but then forgotten how you got there? Or moved to a different computer—in school, at a library, or at work—only to find your list of previous searches gone forever?

If either of these scenarios sounds frustrating and familiar, you may want to check out the My Search History experiment going on in Google Labs. With My Search History, Google keeps track of where you went and what you looked at. If you don’t remember which keywords you used in a past search—but you know roughly when you did the query—you can find the searches you performed on a certain date and time.

My Search History is yet another Google service for which you need a user name and password, though. You can sign up by clicking the “Create a Google Account” link right on the page at www.google.com/searchhistory—or, if you have a previous Google account (Gmail, Froogle Shopping List, or Google Groups), you can simply log in with that.

Using your search history

In order for Google to track and store your Web wanderings, you need to be logged in to your Google account (if you don’t see your email address in black at the top of the page, you’re not signed in). If you’re not logged in, click the Sign In link at the top of the Google home page.

After you’ve signed in, you can search with abandon, just like you normally do, but with the comforting knowledge that Google is quietly logging and compiling your searches as you go. (This is another one of those Google services that privacy advocates probably want to avoid.)

If you need to go back and look up something you saw earlier, click the Search History link at the top of the Google home page to see an organized list of all your searches—compiled by the keywords you originally used. As shown in Figure 7-18, the Search History displays the links to Web pages you visited during that search adventure, along with the date and time you visited. Click the links in the Search History list to revisit the sites. There’s even a calendar on the right side that you can use to click back in time.

Note

If you don’t see the Search History link at the top of the Google page, you probably need to log in to your account. Click the “Sign in” link at the top of the Google home page, or go to www.google.com/searchhistory.

Thanks to your Google account creation, your search history is stored on a server somewhere in Googleland, which means you can get to it from different computers. Simply sign in to your Google account from the home page, and then click Search History to pop into your search past.

If you decide that you don’t want to use the Search History after all, you can zap the whole thing. Sign in to your Google account by clicking the “Sign in” link on the home page (or at www.google.com/searchhistory). Click the My Account button at the top of the page. On the list of Google services on the next screen, click Delete Personalized Search to permanently discontinue the search.

Figure 7-18. Clicking the My Search History link on the Google home page takes you back in time to searches you’ve previously run, with the links you once clicked through organized by original keywords. The calendar on the right side of the page lets you jump around by day of search.

Note

Going through with this deletion has the side effect of deleting your Personalized Search preferences (Section 7.5.1) as well. Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete your Search History without also deleting your Personalized Search settings, and vice versa.

If you do go through with the deletion, however, you can always restart your Personalized Search and Search History by going to www.google.com/accounts and clicking Personalized Search (under Try New Services).

In these times of repetitive stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome, anything that saves a few keystrokes is a helpful, healthy thing. Google Suggest (as its name, er, suggests), is a Google Labs creation that pays attention to the keywords you start to type and tries to finish them for you, too (Figure 7-19).

Figure 7-19. Google Suggest tries to guess what you’re typing as you type it and unfurls a list of possibilities based on the letters you’ve entered. For extra speed, leave the mouse behind and shoot up and down the list with the directional arrow keys on the keyboard. (There’s a Japanese version as well.)

You can find the Google Suggest page at www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en. If you like it and want to make it your official Web browser starting page, cut and paste the URL into your browser’s settings. (In Internet Explorer, choose Tools → Internet Options and then paste the address into the box in the Home Page area; most other Web browsers keep the settings in a similar place.)

Say you start by typing rabb in the search box. Google suggests everything from rabbit to rabbie burns to help you out. If you see your term on the list, tap the keyboard’s down arrow key to select it, and then hit Enter to start the search.

Google Suggest uses an algorithm to anticipate the phrase you’re typing, but says it doesn’t use your personal searching history as part of the formula. Instead, it bases its predictions on the huge pile of data it gathers from everybody using Google, and uses the popularity of those other searches to whittle down its suggestions for you.

To work its suggestive magic, Google Suggest has to keep tabs on what you’re typing as you type it. Privacy-minded individuals may get a little creeped out, as Google Suggest communicates with the mother ship before the keywords are even halfway entered, but the company claims it doesn’t use your personal information for nefarious purposes without your consent. (You can read the company’s privacy policy at www.google.com/privacy.html.)

When Google first started tinkering around with video in 2005, there wasn’t so much to look at—mainly screenshots and short text descriptions of the video pictured. The feature didn’t get a lot of attention because most people expect their moving pictures to actually move.

Fast-forward to today, and Google Video is going like gangbusters. It’s the company’s online marketplace for selling digitized recordings of TV shows, music videos, movies, NBA basketball games, and (most important) Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, each for a few bucks.

But there’s a lot of free, searchable stuff to see, too, from Super Bowl commercials to videos by future rock stars. Plus, Google offers everyone from indie filmmakers to regular camcorder-totin’ folks an open invitation to submit their video productions to the site, no matter the running time. Who needs a movie studio to distribute your digital film when you’ve got Google?

Using Google Video

With Google Video, you can watch the goods right on the Web (via your browser), or through Google’s own video-player software, or in certain cases, on a pocket media player like the Sony PlayStation Portable or Apple’s video iPod.

Note

For some videos, Google lets you watch or buy them only through the Google Video Player (Section 7.5.5.2). The player is a free, downloadable piece of software that, unfortunately for the Apple Corps, works only with Windows at the moment. (Check back periodically for a Mac version.)

To try out Google Video, head to http://google.video.com. When you land in Google’s video emporium, you see a screen full of thumbnail images, each representing a particular clip or show. If you see an image with the familiar tape-deck Play triangle button in the corner, you can play the video right there; simply click the picture to jump to a page where the video starts automatically, running right in your Web browser with no extra effort from you. (If the video is for sale, a clip plays.) If you see an image that doesn’t have the Play button, you can click the picture to get more options in that category.

When you click a thumbnail image and go to a video’s page, the panel on the right side gives you information about where the video came from, when it was made, and the running time. Clickable buttons (Figure 7-20) tell you what exactly you can do with this video (besides just watching it through your browser):

• Download means the video is free and you can pipe your own copy of it down to your computer to play with the Google Video Player (see the next page) or, depending on the file, to your Mac, your video iPod, or your Sony PSP.

• Day Pass means you can pay a small fee to download the video and watch it with the Google Video Player anytime within 24 hours from your purchase—before the file stops working, sort of like a Blockbuster rental that goes poof!

• Buy means you can pay for it, download it, and keep it around on your PC to play. Prices to buy a show or get a day pass vary widely. Most TV reruns cost about $2 to buy, while some sporting events can cost around $15; day passes average about a buck or three. You need Windows and a Google Account (Section 3.5.1) to buy video.

Figure 7-20. After you click a video’s thumbnail, Google takes you to a window where you can play that video onscreen and, in some cases, download it to the computer or potable device. Information about the video is listed on the right side of the screen.

Note

One thing to note on copy-protected shows you may buy from the Google Video Store: You have to be online to play them, so Google can check the playback and make sure everything’s Copyright Kosher. This little sticking point really stinks if you want to watch your purchases off the grid on a plane, train, or bus.

Even with broadband connections like DSL and cable modems, there’s still a need for speed among many Web surfers. Google’s Web Accelerator software—still in the beta testing stage as of this writing—aims to kick things up a notch; install it, and your Web pages download faster, courtesy of Google Labs technology.

Google relies on a number of different processes to pump those pages through the pipe faster. Google Web Accelerator has its own express lane into Google’s servers, for example, and it stores its own copies of popular pages and makes them available more quickly. It can also prefetch (Section 6.2.2.3) some pages to your PC ahead of time, anticipating that you’ll click down a list of search results and want to see them.

In cases where not much on a Web page has changed since you looked at it last, Web Accelerator only grabs the newest stuff on the page and doesn’t bother to make you wait for downloads of the parts you already have in your browser’s cache. To squeeze more data into less bandwidth, the program compresses data before it sends it down to your computer, too.

Google Web Accelerator was designed with broadband connections in mind, however, so dial-up users with visions of shorter wait times will have to keep on waiting. The program was also created for use on Windows XP—or, at the very minimum, Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 installed.

Like a number of other Google services, this one has some privacy implications, because your Web surfing is no longer between you and the other site, but you, the other site, and Google. If that bothers you, maybe you want to stay in the right lane on the Web.

Running Google Web Accelerator

Like many of its experimental products, Google Web Accelerator is in the beta testing stage as of this writing, so the software may still have a few bugs to work out. It lives at http://webaccelerator.google.com, and you can download it for free.

After you download and install the program, a little speedometer icon appears both at the top of your Web browser’s window and down in your Windows system tray. When you go to a Web page that’s Google-boosted, the speedometer spins around, and the amount of time you’ve just saved gets added to a running total, as shown at the top of the browser window in Figure 7-21. Click the number to see a chart of your time saved. (On this page, you can also click to reset the time-saved counter back to zero.)

Note

Security being security, Google Web Accelerator doesn’t speed up encrypted pages with https:// addresses, so your online banking, stock trading, and shopping won’t be any faster.

If you click the speedometer icon itself (Figure 7-21), you get a menu of things to do with your Accelerator, including a preferences area that lets you tell the program the speed of your Internet connection, or instruct it to skip acceleration on specified sites. Your preferences for hauling down Web pages in advance are here (to prefetch or not to prefetch, for example [Section 6.2.2.3]), as well as settings for your browser’s history files and how frequently Google checks for new versions of pages already in its cache.

Figure 7-21. With Google Web Accelerator installed, your browser gets a counter showing how much time you’ve saved since you hit the Accelerator (or hit the reset button). Click the speedometer icon to pull up the menu of Web Accelerator preferences and options.

For those pages you don’t want to run through the Accelerator, there are a couple options. The Accelerator menu includes a “Don’t accelerate this website” option, as well as an option to just turn off the acceleration altogether. If you opt to stop, the speedometer icon down in the system tray takes a break, and you can only restart the Accelerator from the icon on the browser window (unless you’ve booted the icon off your IE window; in that case, restore it to its rightful place by selecting it from the Toolbars menu).

Some people enjoy having pages popping up faster than before and will feel far more efficient as the time-saved counter continues to climb. If you decide, however, that Web Accelerator isn’t doing all that much for you (or those privacy concerns are making you jumpy), you can uninstall Google Web Accelerator in the same place you go to uninstall other programs: Start → Control Panel → Add/ Remove Programs.

Google Sets is easily the experimental feature with the least revealing name. You half expect to hear Marv Albert yelling, “Google sets…he shoots…he scores!” But in fact, this feature performs a handy which-of-these-things-is-just-like-some-others search. For any set of related items you type, Google Sets tries to come up with a list of related search terms.

Here’s how it works. Head over to http://labs.google.com/sets, shown in Figure 7-22. Fill in anywhere from one to five terms that all seem somehow related to you (try months of the year or soft-drink names, for example). Then press Enter or click Large Set or Small Set to find out what matches Google gives you.

Google Sets is quirky. If you search for Yankees, Mets, Cardinals and Red Sox, for example, it gives you a list of Major League Baseball teams—and a bunch of oddball teams, like the Skipjacks, plus a smattering of football, basketball, and hockey teams.

Still, Google Sets can be a nifty way to find related items or jog your memory. For example, if you can’t remember the name of Big Bird’s imaginary friend, try typing in Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Cookie Monster to get a list of the rest of the Muppets (and people) on Sesame Street—including Snuffleupagus. Or if you’re wondering who Seinfeld’s neighbors were, try Jerry, George, and Elaine, to have Google finish the list with Kramer and Newman. To get a list of major cities, you need know only London, Paris, and Washington.

The lion’s share of today’s mobile phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices are Internet capable, meaning they have technology built in to let you surf Web pages and read and send email. Different devices use different Internet-friendly technologies, however.

Some devices—like the palmOne Treo 650, Windows Mobile–based phones, and Sony Ericsson’s P900 Smartphone—have a networking function that lets you reach the Internet over the same airwaves that carry your cellphone calls. This arrangement is similar to your home phone line, which can handle chatty phone calls or dial-up Internet connections with eqaul aplomb.

Other devices, like the Dell Axim X50, have built-in WiFi connectivity. WiFi is a system that lets you connect to the Internet wirelessly, via radio waves. In order to hop online with WiFi, though, you need to be near a unit, known as a base station, that broadcasts Internet signals. These days, your local airport, coffee shop, bookstore, and many McDonald’s all have such base stations. Sometimes you can hook into WiFi hotspots for free; in other places, you have to pay a fee. Either way, using a WiFi-ready PDA is just like using a laptop to connect to a wireless network.

Finally, some handhelds use Bluetooth, a type of short-range wireless networking, to let you connect your PDA to a cellphone that has built-in data networking or to beam files to a printer over the airwaves. Bluetooth itself doesn’t let you get online; rather, it links you with other devices that can connect to the Internet. So if you have a fancy handheld gizmo with Bluetooth features, you still need to find out if it has its own Internet connection, or if you need a cellphone that has built-in networking with which to connect.

If your gizmo has any of these features, consider yourself Internet-capable. If you have no idea what tricks your phone or PDA can do, check your cell carrier’s Web site for information about your device.

Just because your mobile device is capable of connecting to the Internet doesn’t yet mean you can just jump online. Once you have the right kind of device, you still need the service that lets you connect wirelessly—just the way you can have a nice touch-tone phone, but you can’t make any calls without a dial tone. You can usually reach wireless nirvana (the state of having the right device and the right service) by paying your cell service company a fee for Internet access.

Cell service providers, like Verizon and Sprint, sell data plans—that is, Internet access for cellphones and wireless PDAs—for an additional fee on top of your usual monthly calling plan. Depending on the provider, the fee for data plans can range from a flat rate of $15 to $85 per month. And some providers offer a per-megabyte package, similar in structure to your typical phone minute plan, in which you prepay for some amount of data and then pay extra for everything you use over that amount. Work with your cellular provider to select the right Internet access plan.

Once you’ve got your device and data plan lined up, you’re ready to hit the Web. But the Web comes in two flavors on mobile devices. On newer “smart” phones, PDAs, and hiptops, you can get the regular, glorious Web—the one you’re used to seeing on your desktop or laptop computer—via a small Web browser. On older and simpler phones, you may be limited to a text-only version of the Web called WAP, or Wireless Access Protocol, described in the box in Section 7.6.3.2. Figure 7-23 illustrates the difference.

After you’ve sorted out your phone’s Web proclivities, you can get Googling.

Googling by PDA, Hiptop, or Smartphone

If your mobile device of choice is a PDA or one of the smarter smartphones, surfing around works a lot like it does on your desktop or laptop computer. Here’s how to run a Google search:

1. Select Open, Enter Address, Go to URL, or the like from your browser’s toolbar or menus, and enter Google’s home page address: www.google.com .

   If your small-screen browser just isn’t up to the task of displaying full-sized Web pages in all their glory, try Google’s scaled-down home page: www.google.com/palm. Never mind that it appears to be for Palm-branded devices; it works just as well on your Windows Mobile or BlackBerry handheld.

   

   Figure 7-23. Left: Google search results on a full-fledged wireless Web browser. As you can see, they look a lot like the results you’d see on your regular computer—just a lot smaller. Right: Google search results on a WAP browser. Boring but serviceable.

   Note

   Just visiting http://google.com (without the www) may, weirdly, take you to Google Canada. To avoid that quirk, just remember to type the full URL.

2. Click Go or OK to get things rolling.

   Your browser springs into action, signified by a whirling globe, flowing progress bar, or a somewhat less dramatic “Connecting…” message. Depending on whether or not you were already online, you may also see various “Initializing,” “Signing On,” and “Established” messages along the way. It might take a few moments before you see the fresh, familiar face of Google (shown in Figure 7-24)—a tad more scrunched down than usual.

   

   Figure 7-24. Here you can see Google on a Handspring Treo 650. If you’re on Google’s PDA-optimized page, you can click the Full Google link to hop back to Google proper any time.

3. Write or type your search terms into the blank box labeled “Search the Web,” and then click Google Search to send your query on its way.

   Depending on your browser, you either type your search query right in the blank search box, or you tap the search box to open a separate little text-entry dialog box. If your browser opens a separate window where you type in your search terms, go ahead and enter your query; then tap OK or the equivalent button to return to the main browser window, and then tap Search.

   You can run any search you would on a regular computer, and you’ve even got the full range of Google search syntax (see Section 2.6) available to you. You might, however, find that those quotes, colons, parentheses, and minuses are tricky to type on your average mobile device. Sadly, the tech industry has yet to provide a solution for MPI (Mobile Punctuation Issues).

   On mobile browsers, Google scales your results down a bit, leaving out the URL and page size for each (Figure 7-25). You still have access to Google’s local cache of pages and a link to pages similar to a particular result, though. And you can alter your query and run it again from the Google search box at the bottom of every results page.

   That’s it! You can now surf the Web as you would normally.

Figure 7-25. Depending on your device, Google’s PDA-optimized site may just give you 5 results per page, with a Next button at the bottom to let you move on to results 6 through 10, and so forth.

WAP surfing

Most Web pages are not designed for the puny WAP browser on your mobile phone and are thus invisible when you’re surfing on the cell. So how can you visit any of the results your Google searches turn up?

In truth, you don’t actually leave Google and visit other sites at all. Instead, Google reads Web pages for you and scales them down to a form your mobile browser can deal with—usually a neat 10 to 20 lines of text per page (Figure 7-29, top). This proxy service is simply Google acting on your behalf. You can see the proxy setup in this URL:

UP TO SPEED: Texting Sure Ain’t QWERTY

Whether you’re a seventy-word-per-minute touch typist or a hunt-and-peck person, you’re going to find texting a pokey chore. Rather than the array of letters, numbers, symbols, and Shift keys on your computer keyboard, everything you do on your cellphone is confined to twelve keys: 0–9, *, and #. Frankly, it’s an annoying system to learn, although some folks actually become rather adept at it.

Look closely at your phone, and you’ll notice each button also holds either a set of three to four alphabetic characters or obscure symbols not unlike those you’d expect to find on the UFO landing in your backyard. Like your regular phone, the 1 button is devoid of letters, while 2 holds ABC, 3 holds DEF, and so on through 9 (WXYZ).

When you’re in Web-browsing mode on your phone, pressing a button once enters the first letter listed. Pressing the same button twice, quickly, gets you the second letter. The idea is that each time you press a button, you cycle through the letters listed on it. So, for example, when you’re in Web browsing mode on your phone, you can press the 2 button once to type an A, press it twice in quick succession for B, and press it thrice for C. Four times nets you a 2. Keep going, and you’ll make it back through A, B, C, and 2 again, on some phones encountering strange and wonderful foreign letters along the way.

Once you’ve typed a letter and are ready to enter the next, you may need to pause for about a second to let the phone know you’re ready to input the next letter (as opposed to wanting to keep cycling through the letters on the button). In order to spell the word "google,” for example, you type 4666666455533. Here’s a tap-by-tap translation:

4 (gets you a “g”)

pause (on some phones, to let the phone know you’re ready to enter a new letter)

666 (tapping 6 three times quickly gets you an “o”) pause for the next letter

666 (another “o”)

pause

4 (another “g”)

pause

555 (gets you an “l”)

pause

33 (gets you an “e”)

When it comes to special characters like the “.” and “/” common in Web addresses, you can usually turn to the 1 button (although some phones store their special characters in the “*” button). A period or dot is often a single tap of the 1 button, for example. The slash is often 15 taps. For those of you keeping score at home, that gives you 92714666 [pause] 6664555331222666 [pause] 611111111111111196555 for "wap.google.com/wml.”

(Note that the texting equivalent of the Space bar is the 0 button, but you’ll never use that in URLs.)

What of digits? Surely you don’t need to type seventeen or so “1"s scrolling through all the symbols associated with the 1 button [.,-?!'@:;/( )] just to get back around to the digit 1 you wanted in the first place. Thankfully, all it takes is holding down the button for a second or so to jump right to the numeral. So instead of tapping through all the symbols to get to 1, just hold down the 1 key for a moment, and you’re there.

Note that there are other more efficient input techniques such as T9 (“Text on 9 keys”) and other so-called predictive text systems, but they’re not as useful for entering obscure words like those in Web addresses.

	http://wmlproxy.google.com/wmltrans/h=en/g=/q=%22text+on+9+keys%22+-
	discomfort/s=0/u=www.t9.com@2F/c=0

wmlproxy tells you Google is handling a wireless conversion for you, and the address www.t9.com is the actual URL you’re visiting. All the rest is Google’s way of keeping track of your original search.

Figure 7-29. Top: Your standard Web page usually seems boring when you look at it through the lens of the Google proxy. Bottom: The same page (www.t9.com) on a regular PC browser. More fun, but not necessarily a lot more functional.

Google’s proxy service goes beyond searching, letting you view any Web page at all. Here’s how: On the Google Mobile home page, select the Search Options link and choose Go to URL. This link takes you to what appears to be the home page again, only instead of the search box, Google shows you a “Go to URL” box (Figure 7-30). Type in any URL you’d like to visit and then click Go to have Google show you the page in a form your phone can handle.

While the Google proxy is not a substitute for well-designed WAP sites targeted specifically at mobile jockeys, it does the terrific service of bringing you the entire Web on your WAP phone without a lick of work from individual site designers.

Figure 7-30. When you follow a link from this page or any subsequent page, the Google proxy serves it to you, letting you reach every corner of the Web.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: When Abbreviations Attack

Why are there two different addresses for mobilized Google search (www.google.com/xhtml and www.google.com/wml)? Is one better than the other, or does one have cooler stuff?

Both are mobile Web formats, but since XHTML (or WAP 2.0) is a newer standard, you get a bit more bang for your buck when it comes to browsing with the first URL. If you have a newer phone that supports the XHTML format, you can use Google to search for Web sites and images. (Whether or not you can actually see the images on a teeny-tiny phone screen depends on your hardware).

If you’ve got an older wireless phone that can only display WML pages, you can only use Google’s Web search feature via the second URL—but WML can handle queries tapped in with Google Number Search, too (see below).

Luckily, though, if you just want to search on the go and don’t care about all the WAP yap, just type in www.google.com and let Google figure out what kind of phone you have and which kind of mobile-Web pages to send your way.

WAP Search Options

Just as regular-old Google has some advanced features, Google’s Wireless WAP service also has some rather useful search options, shown in Figure 7-31.

Figure 7-31. Follow the Search Options link on the Google mobile home page to reach this menu of alternate ways to interact with the Google search engine.

Here’s what you can do with Search Options:

• Entire Web lets you search the entire Web. Nothing mysterious here.

• Number Entire Web lets you search the entire Web using Google Number Search, a finger-saving system Google developed that lets you single-tap the keypad number associated with any of the letters it represents, rather than selecting a letter tap by tap. Use 0 for space and 1 for quotation marks. So with Google Number Search, you can tap out “google” as 466453, rather than the more demanding 4666 666455533.

  Google Number Search is actually a clever twist on regular results. When you type in a string of numbers, Google figures out the possible words represented by that sequence, and then it shows you the most popular results that include those words. Because it’s guessing about what you really want, the Number Search works well sometimes; other times, it feels like driving with your eyes closed.

  Most of the time, its success depends on the complexity of your search terms. For example, 1839806606463053971, “text on nine keys” as expressed in Google Number Search, comes up with different, yet no less relevant hits, than tapping out the phrase in full. Most people find texting easier, but Number Search is worth playing with if texting has burned out your thumbs.

• Mobile Web lets you search for pages designed specifically for wireless devices. For example, the BBC Mobile site (www.bbc.co.uk/mobile) lays out its links for painless navigation on a mobile keypad, and it divides its stories into logical, mobile-screen-sized bites. This option is handy when you want only fast-loading pages that are easy to cruise on your mobile keyboard.

  Tip

  If you’re curious about the sorts of things you might find on the Mobile Web (that is, Web pages created for WAP browsers), but you’re surfing on a regular computer, try adding filetype:wml to any Google search (pages in WML format are designed for wireless devices). You can convert WML pages, known as cards, to regular old HTML pages—just click the “View as HTML” link associated with any result.

• Number Mobile Web lets you search the Mobile Web using Google Number Search. For example, a simple 222 is a shortcut for BBCi, the BBC Interactive site.

• Go to URL gives you a jumping-off point to reach any Web address—WAP-specific or not—via Google’s WAP proxy (Section 7.6.3.3).

• Language Options lets you interact with Google in Français, Norsk, Svenska, and nine other languages. Similar to Google’s Language Tools (Section 2.4), Google Wireless’s Language Options allow you to use Google in the language of your choice. It affects all the prompts, buttons, and messages from Google, but not the Web pages themselves.

• Help provides very limited online help—one page’s worth—for some Google Wireless features. It’s not that useful, so you may as well skip it.

Tip

If you’re surfing on a cellphone, tapping or texting in the Google URL can take half a presidential administration. To avoid the slog every time you go to Google, save the URL in your bookmarks. Go to google.com/wml and then look around your browser toolbar or menus for something like “Add Bookmark” or “Add to Favorites.” Your mobile browser should automatically name the bookmark for you, probably something like “Google.” Bookmark not only Google but any other sites you visit on a regular basis to save yourself the hassle of retyping addresses again and again.

Just as you can search for the businesses or restaurants in a specific town or Zip code with Google Local on your computer (Section 2.5), you can also use the microscopic power of Google Local on your phone. Peck out http://mobile.google.com/local on your phone’s browser, and you’re ready to go Local.

Google Local wants to know two things from you on the mobile version of the main screen. First, it wants to know what you’re looking for. Then it wants to know where you’re looking for it. Fill in the boxes with the appropriate information like, say, burmese food in san diego or shoes in el paso and then select the Google Search button.

You get back a list of local businesses that match, complete with addresses and phone numbers—and, best of all, a link to a tiny Google Map displaying the locations of the results, just like you get on the grown-up, deskbound version of Google Local. You can even adjust the view by zooming in and out of the wee maps.

As you can do with regular Google Local, you can also use Mobile Local to get yourself some driving direction to and from a place that turned up in your search results. Click the Driving Directions link at the top of your results page to bop to a fresh page where you can peck in starting and ending addresses. Now just navigate to and select the Get Directions button to get a list of instructions for getting between the two places.

If you’re a fan of Google’s Froogle feature (a product-search tool described in loving detail in Section 5.1), you’ll be glad to know you don’t have to lug a laptop to the mall to compare prices of whisks on sale. Instead, try Froogle Wireless, which brings comparison shopping right to your phone or PDA.

Froogle Wireless—currently part of Google Labs—doesn’t offer all the features of a regular Froogle search. You can’t limit your search by price, group the results by store, or sort them in any way. And most limiting, the results from a Froogle Wireless search, like those shown in Figure 7-32, don’t actually link anywhere.

Still, Froogle Wireless is a handy price-check tool when you’re standing in the aisle at Circuit Cathedral, trying to figure out if $149 is a good deal for an extension cord.

Here’s how to use it:

Figure 7-32. $62.99 may be on the high side for a yogurt maker, but if the one in your hand is $75 and doesn’t even make ice cream, you may want to make the purchase elsewhere—and buy some yogurt ingredients with the savings.

To get Google SMS to text you back, you need to send it a question. You do so by starting the text-message application on your cellphone, typing in a query, and then sending the message to 46645, which spells out GOOGL on most phones. (If you’re Googling merrily from the United Kingdom, though, dial 64664 instead—6GOOG, if you need something more alphabetical to remember.)

	from 6925 hollywood blvd hollywood ca to lax

	47405 to ind
	from nashville tn to memphis
	to 570 second ave 10016 from 108 court st 11201

Phone book listings

You can text a query straight to Google SMS and get address and phone numbers for people who are publicly listed in the Google PhoneBook (Section 1.6.3). There are a number of variations, including:

• The person’s full name, city, and state (john doe wheeling wv)

• The full name and just the state (john doe wv)

• The full name and the telephone area code (john doe 304)

• The full name and the Zip code (john doe 26003)

Figure 7-33. Google can answer many popular questions in under a minute. Resist the urge to use it in class.

You may also get results with just the person’s last name and either just the Zip code or the city and state. (If you know the phone number but need the address, type in the phone number and send it to Google SMS.)