Google seems to be at the heart of daily productivity for many businesses across the world. From being the number 1 search engine for the majority of web users in the west, to providing millions of users with email, document creation, mapping and online storage, Google acts as a vital epicentre of how we use the web today.
As a result of having so much dominance in the tech market, Google has many products, some of which you might not know of.
As an example of their diversity, at one point Google were developing a full radio station automated music play back system and have also committed billions of dollars into tackling climate change. There are many layers to this company, and the same goes for its products – so we’ve compiled a short list of 5 Google tricks and lesser known products that you might not be aware of.
1. Undo send on Google Mail
The feeling of hitting send on an email only to realise you’ve spelled the recipient’s name incorrectly isn’t great, but what if you had the chance to undo the sending of your email? Well, now you can with the Undo Send function.
Located in the ‘Labs’ section within Google Mail’s settings, this function acts by inserting a time delay after you hit send. This prevents the email from sending for a few seconds, giving you the chance to cancel the email and make further edits.
2. Animated Google Plus Images
In a bid to elevate people’s creativity when using the Google Plus social network, Google have now enabled the use of animated gif images as profile and header images.
This action will no doubt cause a flurry of cat related profile pictures being uploaded, but seeing as Google are doing impressive things with face recognition on photos and video – such as being able to create highlights of your best photos via means of face recognition – they might be able to one day moderate this.
3. Reverse image searching
In the past it’s been hard if you’ve got an image you want to find more info about. Without typing descriptive words into Google search to try and yield a result, there’s been no practical way to find the origins of those random images you come across.
A reverse image search solves this. Go to Google.com and click the ‘images’ link in the top navigation bar. Then all you need to do is click on the camera icon in the right hand side of the search bar. You’ll be presented with a dialogue box to either upload an image or enter in the URL to one on the web.
Once you’ve added an image, click ‘Search by image’ and Google will use its image recognition to provide image results that resemble the image you uploaded.
This is a great way to find higher resolution versions of images such as company logos.
4. Caching Google Maps in iOS
One of the most annoying things about mobile mapping apps is that if they don’t use the phone’s memory to store the map of the area you’re reading and your mobile signal dies, you’re then without a map.
There’s a hidden trick in Google Maps on iOS which solves this. Whilst using the Google Maps app to navigate, type ‘OK Maps’ into the top search bar and click ‘Search’. This command will download the map and all zoom levels for your current area, meaning that you can navigate without an internet connection.
5. Google Flu Trends
With over 5 billion Google searches performed every day, Google are collecting massive amounts of data. From this data they’re able to spot trending search terms, but instead of using this purely for marketing purposes, they’ve made a tool which can detect where flu might be rampant.
By measuring the number of flu related searches, Google have spotted a direct correlation to high search volume and actual cases of flu. As a result, they’ve created Google Flu Trends.
Flu Trends offers a global map, which indicates the predicted levels of the flu bug in most countries. Having this data is vital to making sure that you’re prepared when visiting another country, and to get a good idea of flu outbreaks in each country.
By Guy Andrews.
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