This is the button on the Google home page to bypass the Google search results page and jump straight to the first search result. This is particularly useful if you are confident that the first search result will be the right one.

For example, a search for toyota will undoubtedly yield Toyota’s home page as the first result; so, if that’s where you want to go, you might as well use the I’m Feeling Lucky button.

While the I’m Feeling Lucky button is still present on the static Google homepage, Google Instant puts it in the drop-down list from the search field. To access it, just use your mouse or arrow keys to highlight an item in the Google Instant list of suggested terms, and you’ll notice I’m Feeling Lucky on the right side of the highlighted field.

This link will take you to the Google Images search engine, which searches millions of images on the Web, including photos, illustrations, buttons, and clipart. If you click the Images link from the Google homepage, you’ll go to the image search homepage instead. If you are on a search result page when you click Images, your search query will be re-executed for an image search.

This specialized search engine puts countless video files at your fingertips, including TV shows, movies, music videos, documentaries, video blogs, training videos, and much more. Some videos require payment to watch. Note that Google has discontinued the ability to upload your own videos here, but you can still share your own videos with their popular YouTube service (discussed in YouTube).

This is a great tool if you need to find local businesses or services in the United States, Canada, and many cities abroad, or if you want to geographically explore a region. It’s especially handy when you’re looking for restaurants within walking distance. Search using location names such as toronto, addresses such as 931 e. main st, madison, wi, type of business such as pizza, or a combination of the above such as hotels near lax. And you can get driving directions, lax to 92780 for instance. You can even conduct keyword searches that are restricted to the map region displayed on your screen. Google returns phonebook listings with associated web pages on the left and, on the right, the top results are all pinpointed on the map.

The map interface allows you to toggle between street maps, satellite images, and hybrid views of both. In addition, many areas are also available in a panoramic Street View mode with photos taken from a specially equipped vehicle. You can also smoothly pan around and zoom without the slow reloading of pages that you get with other mapping services like MapQuest.

This link will take you to the Google News service, which shows a range of top headlines and stories in a variety of categories. From there, you can also query the Google News archives, which will search countless news sources worldwide, including newswires, magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The Google News index is updated continuously, but only includes stories from the past 30 days. For older stories, search the Google News Archive directly at http://news.google.com/archivesearch.

If you are already on a web search result page, click the News link at the top of the page to jump directly to Google News search results. Sometimes Google News results are embedded automatically in the main Google search results, depending on the search query used.

Looking for news related to a certain topic or event? Use the related: operator to see what Google thinks are relevant stories.

This link will take you to Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle, which includes products for sale across online catalog sites across the Web. Sometimes, Google Product Search results are embedded automatically in the main Google search results, depending on the search query used.

Gmail is Google’s web-based email service, which offers users gigabytes of storage absolutely free. POP and IMAP protocols are both supported too. It also has an additional social networking service called Google Buzz, with many features similar to Facebook and Twitter. Google Buzz allows you to broadcast messages and share links and content with selected groups of followers, follow other users, update your location and more.

This dropdown list will take you to Google’s many other sites and services, such as YouTube, Google Labs, and Google Finance. We will explore many of these services later in this book.

This is the place to change the number of results displayed on search results pages, as well as other settings like your preferred language for search results. Or, if you just want to change the number displayed for a particular search, you can manually add &num= followed by any number from 1 to 100 (no spaces) at the end of the URL of any Google search results page (you must have Google Instant turned off for this to work). This will limit the results displayed per page to your specified number—for example, 25 search results for the query marketing will be displayed with the following URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=marketing&num=25

From this screen, you can also turn off Google Instant and personalized search, and erase your web history.

If you create and sign in to a personalized Google Account, you can take advantage of a wide range of personalization and customization options with many of Google’s services. You’ll need a Google Account to use services like Gmail and iGoogle. You don’t have to be signed in for Google to personalize your search based on searches performed with this browser within the past 180 days, but if you do sign in, your entire search history affects the results, and it won’t be tainted by searches done by others who have used this browser recently.

If you’ve got a microphone connected, turned on, and ready to pick up your voice, you can speak your search terms into the main Google search screen. Unfortunately, heavily accented non-American English will fool the speech-to-text algorithm. Even if you speak clearly, sometimes the right words aren’t detected, or the wrong homonyms are used. And if you try to say anything you couldn’t say in a G-rated movie, Google will replace all but the first letter of the term with asterisks to censor it out.

If you’re logged into your Google account, you can choose a background image for your Google home page. Google provides a number of images you can use, or you can upload pictures of your own.

Google automatically senses misspellings and offers corrections at the top of the search results. Sometimes the search results will automatically include results for what Google thinks you’re trying to spell. Simply click on Google’s suggested correction to re-execute your search using the correctly spelled word.

Did you get all excited about a Google result just to find it leads to a File Not Found error, or is the site you’re tying to access temporarily down? Fret no longer. Simply click on the Cached link next to the search result you want, and Google will retrieve the version of the document it downloaded and stored the last time its spider visited the page.

The cached feature is also handy because it will highlight on the page the keywords that you were looking for. Google even specifies in the top right corner of the page when it retrieved that page. Note that sometimes, at the top of the cached page, Google will display “these words only appear in links to this page.” This happens because Google associates the underlined text of hyperlinks with the page that is being linked to.

If you need a cached page to load more quickly, or on a mobile device with limited screen space, append the &strip=1 parameter to your Google cache URL, which will strip the images from the page, or simply click on the link on the cached page that says “Text-only version.”

The Show More Results link sometimes appears under a search result when there are many additional documents from the same site that match your query. Clicking on this link will expand to show some more links from that same site. From there, clicking the Show All Results link at the bottom of the expanded section will conduct another Google search for your query, but the results will be exclusively from the one site.

This is equivalent to adding a site: operator to your query. Note that with More Results and the site: operator, the typical limit of two pages per site in a page of search results does not apply.

When a search result is a PDF file, Word document, PowerPoint file, or Excel document, you can click on View as HTML to preview it as text extracted from the document.

This button enables you to vote for relevant results. Google gives some level of consideration to these votes when weighting its search rankings and customizing your results.

Google advertisers bid against each other to be positioned here and are charged every time someone clicks on a link. The click-through rate in part determines which ads display at the top, in addition to the advertiser’s maximum bid amount. The intention here is that the most relevant ads, according to Google’s users, rise to the top over time.

The left side of the basic SERP provides a wide variety of ways to expand or refine your search, as well as some useful sorting options. The top section will show filtering options for different types of content, so you can see results just from Google News, Google Maps, or some of their other most popular types of searches. You’ll also find a search tools section with a variety of options for limiting your search by other criteria like date ranges, or showing local results only. Some other interesting features worth mentioning here are:

The options you see here will change according to the Google search tool you are using. For example, if you search videos, the options will allow you to filter your results by video quality and duration (among other options), while Google News results will include a wide range of selected date ranges and others. Furthermore, even within a standard search from the Google home page, you might see different filtering options and tools for different types of information in your query. For example, searches for barack obama, green bay packers, how to remove grass stains, and best online prices for women’s shoes might all show slightly different options and filters.

Clicking once on the magnifying glass will invoke Instant Previews, which will allow you to hover over any result to see a thumbnail view of its corresponding web page. This will give you a quick idea of what the page looks like without having to visit it. Instant previews can be handy in a number of unusual situations, such as when you remember visiting a site from a previous search but didn’t bookmark it; you remember what it looked like but can’t remember the URL. It’s also helpful when you have to conserve bandwidth or are on a slow connection and don’t want to take the time to visit each page and wait for it to load.

The Advanced Search page (available under the Search Settings icon on the top right) is a useful crutch if you want to refine your search but don’t remember the search operators explained earlier in this guide. Searching within the title, URL, anchor links to the page, etc. are all supported. However, if you can recall the search operators discussed earlier, it’s more efficient to use them from the main Google search box than to turn to Google’s Advanced Search screen. Some of the more interesting options on this page make it easy for you to exclude words from your query, search for specific file types, and even search by usage rights (e.g., filter results to Creative Commons–licensed content).

The Language Tools page (available under the Search Settings icon on the top right) is where you can change your preferred language for the Google interface, translate phrases and pages, and choose the local Google domain for your country. You can also specify a language or languages to which to have search results translated.

The snippet is not really a “feature,” per se—it’s a traditional part of any search result page. The snippet is a block of text that represents your page content in the SERP. It is dynamically generated by Google at the time of the query, and will change depending on the nature of the search, though it is rarely longer than 156 characters. Snippet content is taken from page content (in various places), meta description tags, and sometimes the Open Directory.

The Translate This Page link only appears in the search results next to documents that are in a foreign language. Bear in mind that machine translation will give a very inexact English version of the document; it’s not always intelligible, but you can usually get the gist of what’s being said on the page. The Google Translate engine also gives you options for translating into other languages.

The magnifying glass icon to the right of each search result will enable you to see a thumbnail preview of a page without having to visit the link.

Follow the link in the bottom left of the Preview pane (accessible via the aforementioned magnifying glass icon) to display documents that Google considers similar to the document in the search result by executing a related search on its URL using the related: query operator.

Google’s search box very effectively second-guesses what you are searching for before you finish typing in your search phrase and fills in the rest of the search term for you. In other words, just start typing and, with each keystroke, Google starts suggesting search keywords.

For example, if you type “buy c”, Google lists search terms in what appears to be in order of search popularity, such as buy cds, buy car, buy cars, buy cd, buy computer, etc.

Customize Google’s home page with your city’s weather, your favorite team’s scores, latest messages from your Gmail inbox, past search history, saved bookmarks, late-breaking headlines across numerous news sources and RSS feeds, and more.

Google is constantly developing new features and services, and it almost never waits for any of them to be “done” before making them available to users. Sometimes Google engineers will push a new feature out into an existing search service without much (if any) warning, test it for a while to see if and how people are using it, then either change or remove it later. Features can appear or disappear in an instant, but actual Google services that the company wants to shut down are phased out for a long period of time before they go totally dark.

Google often makes new services available on an invitation-only basis. If you aren’t extremely well-connected, you might not get an invite to a new service until it goes mainstream.

If a new feature isn’t introduced and activated by default in its services, Google will put it into an experimental area so that users can find it on their own and choose to try it out. Each service has its own “experimental” or “labs” area. For the standard Google web search, that area is here:

At any given time, you may find some interesting and useful features there.