Google Instant Preview is a new feature following the September roll out of Google Instant which completes searches while they’re being typed into Google’s search field, with the goal of significantly reducing time spent searching.

But is the new feature really going to speed up the searcher’s experience, or is it yet another complicated layer on what was once a simple and easy-to-understand search interface? Google’s own research revealed that on average searchers using Google Instant Preview are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search results they clíck after seeing a visual preview next to the organic listing.

Google Instant Preview essentially gives users the ability to see a website before they visit it. Google accomplishes this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it via a magnifying glass icon that sits to the right of every search result.

When a user clicks on the magnifying glass icon, a screenshot of the webpage in question will appear to the right of the search result listing. It’s an at-a-glance view of the website page without actually having to visit the webpage.

One of the key elements to Instant Previews though is that Google sometimes highlights a section of the page where the page description occurs. This becomes a useful feature when you’re trying to find information on a specific person on a page that lists dozens or hundreds of people. Instead of having to scroll through the entire page to find the person, you can just look at the Instant Preview and see where they are on the page.

“We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load,” Raj Krishnan, Product Manager wrote in the Google Blog. “With Google Instant Preview, we match a search query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customised to your search–usually in under one-tenth of a second.”

SEO expert Peter Bowen at First One On says, “while Google Instant Preview is designed to speed up the searching process what it actually does is to speed up the decision-making process of choosing whether or not to clíck on the link by previewing the visual screenshot of the resulting webpage.”

“Google currently provides a lot more data to help the searcher. At one tíme search engines just displayed the first two lines from a webpage under a search result, but now they include information like site links, date, cached content, jump to links and even Google Places.”

Instant Previews can be helpful for many kinds of tasks. For example, say you looked at a page before and need to find it again – with a preview, you can tell if any of the results look familiar. Or perhaps you’re looking for an official website – look for a logo and formal style and you’ll probably be able to identify it. Or maybe you’re looking for a how-to guide – it’s easy to spot a page with clear illustrations and step-by-step instructions.

From an SEO perspective the big question is how will Google Instant Preview affect our understanding of traditional SEO, and what changes should we consider making to webpages so that they can be easily previewed in a tiny screenshot?

When a searcher performs a search and sees the search results page displayed, they do have a choice of whether or not to activate the Google Instant Preview feature by clicking on the magnifying glass icon.

“However, clicking on the magnifying glass icon is less of a commitment than clicking on a link, and you still need to convince the searcher that it is worth their time to preview a website” says Peter Bowen. “Therefore it becomes more important than ever to have a well defined and well written description of what the website page is about and it has to fit within the 150 character limit. So the Meta content description is what you will have to change and be aware of here.”

As we already know, Flash is not SEO friendly because it cannot be read by search engines and is even worse for Instant Preview as it shows as a black rectangle and cannot be rendered. The same is true for video files that also display a black rectangle in the preview, so consideration of this is important too.

It should be pointed out that because the image size of the screenshot is so small, unless the text in headings is large enough, it will be impossible to read.

So what does all this mean? Well, we have to start thinking about the overall page layout and if it looks good at postage stamp size or if it is just a blur of text with no images to make it look appealing. This means creating pages that pay more attention to navigation, titles and headers, spacing, colors and objects, such as call-to-action buttons. Having a good looking page with relevant titles now may count as much as the content on the page itself.

It is likely that we will begin to see a lot more webpages with well defined graphics and other visual aids designed to get a searcher’s attention. This makes SEO even more important than ever, make sure that your images are named with keywords and their filenames and alt text are descriptive and accurate.

Google Instant Preview is here to stay and designed to make the search selection process easier and according to Google faster, but in the end, good SEO practices are what is going make the difference of whether or not you get discovered on the search engine results pages.

Last week Google rolled out a feature they’re calling Instant Previews. It allows searchers to see a preview of websites appearing in their results without clicking through to the site.

If you conduct business online, Google is an 800 pound gorilla you need to keep tabs on: chances are they deliver a lot of your traffic. There’s still a lot of dust yet to settle, but there are some issues that you should start thinking about now.
Check The Mirror Before You Leave

If you haven’t seen Instant Previews, try it out. It’s pretty handy. It will be particularly helpful for searches where the description appearing in the results doesn’t clearly communicate site content.

But it does give you something else you need to think about: Google Instant Preview is another opportunity to put your “best foot forward” with potential customers. Which means it’s another place you need to be examining your presentation and branding.

Most previews will be too small to discern any significant copy, will your pages still represent your brand effectively? Can you communicate your value proposition in a preview? Is your site design compelling enough to entice users to click through?

Take a look at some examples before you assume that the answer to that question is always “Yes:”

This is what Flash sites look like in Google Instant Preview:

Even javascript and Ajax appear to the problematic. Here’s Apple.com, a site that champions web standards, and a product of arguably the best branding machine on the planet:

Designing pages and using technology that affords a good presentation and user experience is going to payoff for the businesses that start now.
Check Your Numbers Before You Report Them

We at [meta]marketer, and in the wider analytics community, are still investigating what this is going to mean, and Google has been characteristically opaque about how this will affect measurement.

It is clear the “render fetches” by Google that create the preview image are being counted. This means you can expect your visits, visitors, and pageviews and bounce rate to increase. If you use any of those metrics – for example to report to advertisers or investors – you’ll need to take precautions to prevent reporting false results. Keep in mind that the more traffic you receive from organic search, and the more frequently you appear in search rankings, the more skewed this is likely to be.

Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t lead to an easy solution. This is especially true if you’re using Google Analytics – as most sites are – since it simply doesn’t provide the tools to examine or filter these preview fetches without significant development work – and even then, prospects are limited.

If you’re intrepid, the user agent sting for previews appears to be consistently reported as:
Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13

but getting that data into your measurement tools and using it is going to take some work. The whole community will be discussing and investigating this problem for the foreseeable future.
But Wait, There’s More

Since it gives you another point of contact with potential visitors, it would be nice to measure whether searchers who see your preview actually click through. After all, the more effectively you use Google, the more relevant traffic you’re going to get. As use of Google Instant Previews increase, your ability to measure and affect preview performance is going to impact your success.

Unfortunately, you can’t. As I said earlier, the “render fetches” that happen when Google is generating previews do count as views and visits in your metrics, so you might think you could somehow use that to determine a clickthrough rate. The problem? Those fetches don’t happen when a searcher previews your site, as you might expect.

In Google’s blog post introducing the feature, Raj Krishnan says:

Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.

Which means that your preview is going to be fetched if a user previews any search result appearing on the same result page as your site, even if the searcher doesn’t preview your page. So for now it looks like there’s no way to determine whether a visitor viewed a preview before clicking through to your site.
So, What Do I Do?

The first thing you should do is perform searches for the keyphrases you’re concerned with and check out the previews Google displays for your pages. Don’t check to see if they look accurate, but see if they would entice a searcher to click through to your site. If not, you’ve now got another project on your plate.

Once you’re off and running, you’ll also have to address the analytics problems. Do you need to invest technical resources in mitigating skewed data? Is your analytics platform sophisticated enough to tackle the problem? How does this affect your ability to compare historical site performance? What are you going to do about it?

Yahoo! kicked off the new decade in high gear and it’s been a big year for us, especially in Search. In 2010, we worked hard on innovating what we call the “front end” of our Search experiences to bring you more answers – not just those same old ten blue links you’ve been seeing on Search results pages for over a decade.

For example, we added features like apps, intelligent shortcuts, and Yahoo! Search Assist updates to help you save valuable time and keep you more entertained, informed and productive than ever. And, in parallel, we were hard at work weaving search throughout the Yahoo! network and transitioning certain parts of our back-end technology to the Microsoft search platform.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve been busy with this year:

Completed the first phase of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance transition in the U.S. and Canada.
Added richer shortcuts and suggestions to bring you more complete, faster answers that draw from our Web of Things, a powerful information system that acquires and enriches information available on the Web and unique to Yahoo!.
Brought Search to you in more places across Yahoo!, sometimes before you even knew what you were looking for – with new Search enhancements in Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Mail.
Innovated mobile search experiences with new apps, widgets, and HTML5-powered search for mobile browsers, since we know you’re on the go more than ever before.
Enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist to suggest locally relevant and more timely results based on when and where you actually are.
Showed you more of what’s hot with multimedia search so you can sit back and be entertained while finding what you’re looking for via Yahoo! Image and Video search.
· Delivered new types, and more relevant search advertisements for when you want them.
And (as you may have seen this week) launched even more Quick Apps so you can get stuff done while you’re searching, as well as a new beta called Yahoo! Clues for searching the searchers.

We have no intention of slowing down either. Last year at this time, we said the possibilities for search technology were limitless, and I think that’s more true today than ever before. You’ve seen just our first steps at re-imagining and fundamentally changing the face of Search as we know it today. Search is not just about meeting one need – we are focused on meeting all your searching needs, from finding all information across many sources about a particular topic, to making comparisons, to taking action and completing tasks in your day.

So stay tuned – 2011 is approaching fast and there’s much more still to come.

Google wasn’t satisfied with just having Instant Search, now it has introduced something called Instant Previews. Searchers and web users can now browse a large instant “preview” of a site’s content by placing the cursor over the small magnifying glass displayed beside each listing. These previews are large and Google sometimes highlights a major paragraph or quote from each displayed site.

Searchers can get a general look at the layout and design of a site, onpage graphics and bold headlines can usually be seen from the preview. However, small print and the general content of the page can’t be read, so searchers will have to click through to your site if they want to read your information. Assuming of course, they don’t find what they’re looking for in the headlines or bold print.

Whether searchers will use this new feature remains to be seen, but these instant previews could have some ramifications on who gets the “click through” to their site. One would also reason that getting the top spot in the rankings have diminished somewhat, if searchers can quickly preview all of the top 10 listings and then make their decision. So they might not click the top listing, but decide one lower down is worth clicking. This could make any listing on the first page more worth having, not just the top one.

This doesn’t really affect any of your SEO strategies and you should be optimizing for the search engines as usual. After all, getting those top rankings for your targeted keywords in the major search engines is what brings in the quality traffic to your site. In this regard, it’s business as usual.

However, Google’s Instant Previews does change the whole nature of SERPs or rather Google’s search results in that webmasters and marketers have another hurdle to get past before they get that final click. Searchers might click your top number one ranking preview and decide your page is not up to standard or it’s not what they’re looking for, and can quickly try out the other listings instead.

From Google’s perspective these previews could improve the “overall” quality of their results because searchers will come away happy, especially if they have not wasted their time clicking on a link, only to find it’s not what they’re looking for. Now they can easily find the right results more quickly and efficiently.

For the webmaster or online marketer, these new Instant Previews can be seen as another chance to get that all important click. They must make sure their page design is up to scratch and featuring a catchy headline which draws visitors to their page or site. Also, highlighting a well worded summary could help attract more of these visitors. So too, would placing your main keyword phrase in bold print so that it can be read from the preview.

Needless to say, webmasters/marketers must always keep their targeted keywords front and center. Highlighting them on your page in the main title is already a given, but now you should make sure they can be read from the preview. This could possibly give you an edge with it comes to getting that click from Google.

On a more general note, these previews also add to the time searchers will spend on Google’s results pages. Google has been steadily focusing on this factor in recent months. Why? One good reason – the longer a searcher stays on your page the more likely they are to click your paid ads. Stands to reason, if the searcher can’t find what they’re looking for in the so-called “free organic listings” (actually, truth be told, for very lucrative keyword phrases these are not free, nor organic) they will look to the paid Adwords listings.

If you check out the average time spent on Google, according to Alexa, in 2009 it was around 7 minutes and now in 2010 that average has jumped to around 14 minutes. And that’s before both Google Instant Search and Google Instant Previews are fully rolled out and implemented. One would expect that number to go much higher. While this is nowhere near Facebook’s average time of 31 minutes, Google has still doubled the time it had only a year ago. No wonder, Google can afford to give their employees that 10% raise, they have probably earned it.

Nor should Google be criticized for doing all of this, they are a business and their goal is to bring in more revenue. Besides, these previews will no doubt improve the effectiveness of Google’s SERPs. Searchers can more quickly find what they’re searching for on Google and come away happy. A satisfied customer is the ultimate goal of any business, why should Google be judged any differently.

However, for the webmaster and online marketer, keeping Instant Previews in mind when creating webpages is a must. Here are some suggestions you can follow:

1. Improve Your Graphics – These can really grab the searcher’s attention in the preview so it’s vital to have eye-popping graphics right next to your important information.

2. Create Great Headlines – Good headlines quickly capture the searcher’s attention and draws him/her to your page; just make them bold enough to be seen in Google’s previews.

3. Write An Informative Summary – Place your important information in a short summary which also captures the viewer’s attention. Entice these viewers to visit your site or page.

4. Take A Multi-Layered Approach – Just don’t aim all your marketing towards free organic search, but try video listings, news listings, image listings… to get other ways onto Google’s first page.

5. Finally, PPC Advertising – This is probably not what you want to hear, but paid listings through Google Adwords is another option. Besides, for extremely lucrative keywords, as more and more major companies throw major funds into SEO and Keyword Link Buying, organic search is not really free or even available to everybody anymore. For the small-time webmaster or marketer, paid listings in Google may be your only option and that option is quickly becoming too costly for many.

Of course, how Instant Search and Instant Previews play out in the near future is still open to wide speculation. Will searchers even use those added features in their daily searches? Or will users opt–out and go back to a more gentle, less hurried Google? One thing that all of us can be sure of, Google will be constantly rolling out new features and innovations just to make all our lives a little more interesting.

Google’s new Instant real time search has sent massive shock waves through the online SEO and search engine market community.

If you’re a webmaster or an online marketer you’re probably checking your stats/traffic/conversion numbers like never before – Google sure knows how to make everyone dance!

None of this would matter if Google wasn’t the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google means traffic, Google means targeted customers, and Google means money in the bank for countless online marketers and webmasters who receive all of the above from the little search engine that roared.

What is really frightening, Google almost has a monopoly on the online search market, especially now with Yahoo being powered by Bing. Webmasters and marketers can now only rely on two search engines to supply their search traffic.

While there are numerous sources of viable traffic on the web outside of the search engines… many marketers already have the majority of their online marketing geared to the search engines, especially Google.

Most of these same marketers were instantly worried (some say horrified) how Google’s new real time search would impact their marketing, especially their long-tail keywords which bring in most of the sales?

While the jury is still out on that one, other issues are popping up regarding “paid listings” and how it is now more dominant in search results, pushing the free organic listings down further and sometimes pushing them out of the fold.

Even with the arrow keys now coming into play, many searchers are just too lazy to scroll and will just click the first visible listings.

Perhaps even more important are the results which pop-up when you first start typing in your search query. These are really the golden winners in Google’s Instant Search. Having your site or company listed when a searcher types the first letter – has to be a real traffic bonanza.

Now these results vary from country to country, the results showing for the United States are slightly different from those showing for Canada.

Again, Google is showing why it is the top search engine in the world – the Canadian results are well matched with NHL, Canadian Tire, BMO, Rogers, Via Rail… all showing up.

Below you will find a list of the 26 American and Canadian Golden Winners in Google’s new Instant Search. These first letter offerings will vary somewhat according to your location and as search queries change over time. Plus, if you’re logged into Google, your starred or bookmarked favorite sites will be listed at the top.

United States Canada

amazon…………air canada
best buy……….bmo
craigslist……..canadian tire
dictionary……..dictionary
ebay…………..ebay
facebook……….facebook
gmail………….gmail
hotmail………..hotmail
ikea…………..ikea
jet blue……….job bank
kohls………….kijiji
lowes………….lotto max
mapquest……….mapquest
netflix………..nhl
orbitz…………osap
pandora………..paypal
quotes…………quotes
rei……………rogers
sears………….skype
target…………tsn
usps…………..utube
verizon………..via rail
weather………..walmart
xbox…………..xbox
yahoo………….youtube
zillow…………zellers

As you can plainly see there are some differences in the instant listings for each country, reflecting the search queries which are made. Regardless, those websites which pop up first will no doubt get much more traffic, especially for the commercial sites and companies. These golden winners are smiling all the way to the bank.

The way people search is changing. That much is clear. Some of that is their own doing, and some of it is the doing of search engines. People are increasingly going to apps or social media for retrieving different types of information. Google recently released Google Instant and expects to change user behavior with it.

Last week, we discussed what impact Google Instant might have on SEO. The topic has been widely discussed around the web. The conclusion some of us reached is that SEO will not die, but will continue to change, but one still can’t help but wonder how to divide efforts among SEO and other forms of online marketing. Neil Jones at ISEdb.com writes:

Getting top spot is now even more important. If you can dig out some heat maps of Google search results from a couple of years ago, you will see people were clicking all over the page, If you look at recent heat maps they have managed to corral people into predominantly clicking on the top 3 results.

It has always been important to get high rankings but now it is looking like; if you’re not number 1 you’re not getting the click. The combination of Google Instant and the sponsored search results pushes the organic SERPS right down the page, in a lot of the searches I have done, the only result that is left above the fold is the number one listing, Real estate on the first page was tough enough to come. Now it could be clicks that are going to get harder to come that are unless you’re number one.

There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”
Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury’s still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP.
Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we’ll see.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, “. their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site… I’ve never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip’s but there was like 10-20 of them running at once.”

Acquisition

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it’s unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

This week Google released its new design for Image Search. The new design includes a tiled layout with instant scrolling between pages. This has already drawn some inevitable comparisons to Bing’s image search, which is particularly interesting given Google’s overall more Bing-like user interface launched earlier this year.

In fact, Google has been drawing a great deal of criticism, and general observation this week regarding its increasing “Bingness”. A very large percentage of the articles written this week about Google’s new image search, not only make comparisons to Bing, but mention it in the title.

Some question why Google is trying to become more like Bing, while it already controls a much larger part of the search market. Others think the changes are for the better. After all, it’s not like Google has changed its algorithm to match Bing’s.

Still, “It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing, notes Converseon’s Mike Moran. “Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?”

Let’s Look at the actual new design…

You can get up to a thousand images in one scrolling page, and the pages will have page numbers so you can keep track of where you are. This has been a feature lacking from Bing’s image search (though it does at least display a number for the range currently displayed…such as 377-416 of 6,400,000 results).

Google is also providing larger thumbnail previews on the results page, with a hover pane that appears when you mouse over a thumbnail. This includes more info and other features like “similar images.”
“Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it,” explains Google Images Product Manager Nate Smith. “Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.”

Finally, you can use Page Up/ Page Down to scroll through pages quickly.

Some webmasters have taken issue with Google’s new image search design, complaining that it puts their ads further away from being clicked. “The main issue from a webmaster perspective, as noted in WebmasterWorld, is that when you click on an image, it doesn’t take you to the site,” writes Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable. “Instead, it keeps you on Google, overlays the image in large format on top of your grayed out web site.”

“So any ads on your site won’t be clickable after the first click from Google. Users are instructed to either go back, click on the web site with the image or click on the actual image source file,” he explains. “I should note that clicking anywhere on the background web site will take you to that web site.”

Remember, the new design did come with a new ad format too. The format is called (appropriately) Image Search Ads.

“These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text,” explains Google Images Product Manager Nate Smith. “We hope they’re a useful way to reach folks who are specifically looking for images.”

Advertisers can review specific performance metrics for their ads on Google Images. They are priced the same as standard AdWords ads with cost-per-click pricing. More on these here.

As far as Google’s recent design choices, it is pretty clear that Bing has had some kind of influence on them. The question is whether or not this is a good thing. So, I’ll ask you…is it?

Have you ever wondered who is listing you better Yahoo or Google?
Today we are featuring an app that will let you compare listings for certain search phrases between Google and Yahoo.

Bear in mind that it is always a good idea to submit your URL to both search engines before hand.
You cant expect Google to know your website exists if you don’t tell them about it!.

the application is called Comparing Google and Yahoo! Search results, You can also compare google to other google domains like google.com to google.cn

when running the search the results are displayed with lines joining the positions on each server.

So “Google” yourself or your website and see where you stand.

The people at Google are truly inspired! They are evolving their search engine into something that can be an incredibly powerful tool for business. There are a zillion things that Google can do for different parts of your business and in this post, I will highlight the top 10 Google search tools that will help your supply chain.

Since Google is just a click away, I think it’s a very useful for everybody involved in the supply chain to be aware of how much easier it can make their lives. Everybody from traffic managers, to purchasing people, to accounting people and customer service will likely need to reference what Google can do during the course of the week. There are a lot of people who don’t even know all of Google’s capabilities. So without further ado, here is your:

Top 10 Google Search Tools That Will Help Your Supply Chain

1. Package Tracking – You can track packages by typing the tracking number for your UPS, Fedex or USPS package directly into the search box. Some of the LTL and motor carriers also allow for you to plug in their pro numbers as well. Google will return results that include quick links to easily track the status of your shipment.

Example of what to search for: “1Z9999W9999999999″

2. Time – This is huge when dealing with vendors or customers overseas or across the country. To see the time in many cities world wide, type in “time” and the name of the city.

Example of what to search for: “time London”

3. Currency Conversion – This is cool! To use Google’s built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you’d like done into the Google search box and they’ll provide your answer directly on the results page.

Example of what to search for: “150 GBP in USD”

4. Unit Conversion – Countries use different metrics for measuring. This tool is extremely useful. You can use Google to convert between many different units of measurement of height, weight, and volume among many others. Just enter your desired conversion into the search box and Google will do the rest.

Example of what to search for: “10.5 cm in inches”

5. Calculator – Since Google is right on your desk top you don’t have to go searching for your calculator. Plus it uses Excel style equations so it’s really easy for business people who think in Excel. To use Google’s built-in calculator function; simply enter the calculation you’d like done into the search box.

Example of what to search for: “5*9+(sqrt 10)^3=”

6. Weather – Weather plays a big role in transportation so this is great for getting a snapshot of the world’s weather. To see the weather for many U.S. and worldwide cities, type “weather” followed by the city and state, U.S. zip code, or city and country.

Example of what to search for: “weather San Francisco, CA”

7. Maps – Want to see the mileage between a shipper and a consignee or try to figure out where your vendor is located? This is great! Type in the name or U.S. zip code of a location and the word “map” and Google will return a map of that location. Clicking on the map will take you to a larger version on Google Maps.

Example of what to search for: “Seattle map”

8. Area Code – This can be helpful in situations ranging from trying to find where a phone call is coming from to finding out what part of the country you are calling. To see the geographical location for any U.S. telephone area code, just type the three-digit area code into the Google search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button.

Example of what to search for: “212″

9. Stock Quotes – Wanna see how a freight carrier or a vendor is doing in the market? Just type the ticker symbol into the search box. On the results page, you can click the link to see more data from Google Finance as well.

Example of what to search for: “MSFT”

10. Earthquakes – I have heard carriers make up some crack pot reasons why they missed the delivery. In case you are given the old earthquake excuse, you can use Google to see if the story checks out. To see information about recent earthquakes in a specific area type “earthquake” followed by the city and state or U.S. zip code.

Example of what to search for: “earthquake 90210″

*When entering keyword or phrase into Google’s search engine with these tools, do not use quotation marks.