The topic of this weeks show was how to search using Google’s search engine.  Yes of course you can search for typical things like “what i britney doing now?” or “Where can I get the best steak and cheese sub?”, but Google’s search has so much more to offer, and it’s not obvious until now.

As you may noticed above, I put double quotes (“) around the phrases I wanted to search for.  When you place double quotes around a phrase in Google’s search, you are searching for everything that has that exact phrase in it.  Go ahead, try those two search phases, I’ll wait…  Also try the phrases without the double quotes, you will get different results.

You can find weather for any city in the world by typing weather {city name} for example: weather springfield.  If you want to know what time it is in London type: time London.  Or if you are into trading stock, all you have to do is type the ticker symbol and you will get the latest stock information for that company.

Google has a built in dictionary, so if you ever want to find out a quick definition of a word just type the following: define:word for example to find the definition of the word ‘technology’, type ‘define:technology’ without the quotes.

Sometimes, or should I say most of the time, you will get results that are all over the place and have several different web sites.  This can get confusing.  Maybe you just want to search a specific site for something.  For example if you want to search for Episode 2 on the TechwithMike.com website, you would type – site:www.techwithmike.com “Episode 2″ (notice the quotes around Episode 2).  This is saying I want to find every instance of Episode 2 on the techwithmike.com web site.  You can even go as far as listing websites that have links to another site by typing link:www.microsoft.com.

Have you ever sat in front of the computer and needed a calculator,  not realizing that big hunk of metal and plastic that you keep pounding on while doing searches can do it for you.  Of course you can use the calculator software that comes with most computers, but that isn’t much fun.  Google’s search has a builtin calculator.  You can do simple addition (+), subtraction(-), multiplication (*) and division (/).  You can even find the percentage of something or even raising to a power (^) like 2^5.  You can do complex equations like 5*9+(sqrt 10)^3=   leaving nothing after the =.  The answer is by the way the answer is 76.6227766.

Another use of the calculator is conversions.  You can convert measurements of height, weight, and mass among others. Try typing: convert 24 inches to feet or convert 3 miles to inches.  Pretty cool huh?

Finally if you are looking for a good place to eat that is local to you, try typing something like this: Italian food 90210.  Of course use your zip code!

I also talked about Google Apps and that you can use it with your own domain like techwithmike.com.

User email: Koolguy wanted to know how he could install Windows programs on his Ubuntu Linux installation.  Here is the email I responded to him with:

To run windows programs in Ubuntu you should use WINE.  I believe it stands for WindowsEmulator.
It comes with Ubuntu, but you need to install it.�
Here is a great tutorial on how to do it via YouTube.  The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_DcHfEnQnU (the video is not good quality, but you should be able to follow.

Also, please signup at the forums at http://www.techwithmike.com/forums.  You can ask questions there.  That way it can help others as well.

My goal with the site is to create a community of people that want to talk about computers and other technologies.