Category: Google Search

Sometimes you just need a fun fact.  Whether you are at a party trying to throw out some random trivia or teaching your kids some fun things about animals, flowers or other things, fun facts can be, well, fun, and maybe even educate you at the same time.  Google Search is making it easier to find those fun facts with a improved algorithm that surfaces these types of searches.  If you type in “Cat fun facts”, you will get a highlighted (with larger print) fun fact about cats.  Refresh your search (pull down on the screen on your Android phone) and it will give you a new fun fact.  There is nothing you need to update, it is just something that is now showing up more predominantly in search results.

Most of the fun facts are for animals and plants but you’ll also find some fun vegetable facts too.

A great new feature is rolling out to Google Search for Android that will help you be more productive when you are offline.  Now when you do a search and you do not have a data connection (LTE or Wi-Fi), Google Search will queue your search queries and will provide the results back to you when a connection is established.  The idea is that you don’t have to remember to do that search later.  You can do it at the moment, it will queue, and you will get the results once you are back online.

Here is a scenario for you.  Let’s say you are on a flight with no Wi-Fi (I know, animalistic but go with me on this) and you are working on a research project.  You can do a search while you are in airplane mode and Search will queue it up.  You land, take your phone out of airplane mode and you get a notification that your search query has been answer.  It saves you time and you don’t have to try to remember to do the search later.  Do it at the moment and get the results back when you are back online.

[Note:  While comments on this post are welcome, any post regarding one political party or another will be deleted.]

Regardless of where you stand politically, Google Search has you covered tomorrow.  With Americans going to the polls to decide not only the presidential election but multiple Senate, House or Representatives and other local elections, November 4th every four years is an seemingly endless flow of information.  Google is trying to give you a one-stop-shop for all that information.  On your Android Phone you can type in “Election Results” in Google Search and you will be taken to a comprehensive overview of all the election results for the country and your particular state.

Starting when the polls close on Election Day, you will be able to find U.S. election results integrated right into your Google searches in over 30 languages around the world. You’ll also be able to see detailed updates and results of the Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Gubernatorial races as well as state-level referenda and ballot propositions.

But, if you want live streaming of information, Google has an answer for you there too.  YouTube.

A pretty nice little feature has been turned on in Google Search for Android, mini widgets.  These new semi-transparent widgets appear just below the search bar to give you quick information like weather, commute information, local information and so forth.  As I have been traveling this week and have enabled this feature, it is actually very handy and I’d encourage readers to enable it on their phones.  Keep in mind it doesn’t show up all the time so even if you have it enabled, you may not see it immediately.

Fall Fashion Week is nearly here and Google Search is making it easier than ever to follow the events, fashion houses, designers and, of course, the fashions during the events.  Across the world starting next week and with events in New York, Milan, Paris and London (to name a few), keeping up with all of it can be challenging.  Google Search is aiming to make it just a bit easier.  Starting now you can type in “Fashion Week” in Search and it will bring you designers, top stories and links to information from these events from around the world.

And this year in Google Search on your mobile phone, you can see the latest styles straight from the runway, hear directly from the designers, shop your favorite looks, see the schedule of events, find related news and follow the action like you’re sitting in the front row — or even backstage.

Google has partnered with BFA and firstVIEW to give you a wealth of information about what is going on not only on the runway but behind the scenes, the parties and of course the celebrity sightings. For Search users, you get the benefit of just being able to go one place to get all the information you want on the events around the globe.

Google Search on your Android device just got a whole lot more powerful.  The Search team announced that a new feature named In Apps is now rolling out to the app on Android devices that will allow you to search content within apps installed on your phone.  Now you can search for a contact for example and find that contact along with being able to see all the messages that you have had with that contact in the various apps you have used to contact them.  Perhaps even more useful, you can search for a subject from an email and Search will interrogate Gmail to find that email.  Essentially this new feature eliminates the need to do per-app searching (if that is possible) and takes it to the system level.