I can only say "WoW"! This is wild - try it!
Google added five features last week that boost its numerical smarts, providing specific results in response to particular numeric searches.
Enter an airline flight number -- for example, "united 80," -- and the popular search engine will provide links to reports on that flight's status at Travelocity.com and Fboweb.com, including maps showing its progress.
Type an area code into the search box, and you'll be pointed to a MapQuest.com map of the general region that area code covers. A U.S. Postal Service package tracking number yields a link to a delivery-status page at the Postal Service's Web site. A vehicle identification number will call up a page describing the car's year, make and model type.
Or you can type in a universal product code number -- minus the dashes, but including any tiny numbers appearing to the far left or right under the bar code -- and Google will look up the product's full name, then generate a list of Web sites selling the item or providing other information about it. This can spare shoppers from trying to guess which search keywords would bring up the same information.
(See www.google.com/help/features.html for details on these features.)
The idea here, as with Google's other search shortcuts, is to spare users the trouble of going to other, more specialized Web sites to get this kind of detail. But they also serve to drum up more advertising business for Google, which makes its money showing ads related to queries
Google added five features last week that boost its numerical smarts, providing specific results in response to particular numeric searches.
Enter an airline flight number -- for example, "united 80," -- and the popular search engine will provide links to reports on that flight's status at Travelocity.com and Fboweb.com, including maps showing its progress.
Type an area code into the search box, and you'll be pointed to a MapQuest.com map of the general region that area code covers. A U.S. Postal Service package tracking number yields a link to a delivery-status page at the Postal Service's Web site. A vehicle identification number will call up a page describing the car's year, make and model type.
Or you can type in a universal product code number -- minus the dashes, but including any tiny numbers appearing to the far left or right under the bar code -- and Google will look up the product's full name, then generate a list of Web sites selling the item or providing other information about it. This can spare shoppers from trying to guess which search keywords would bring up the same information.
(See www.google.com/help/features.html for details on these features.)
The idea here, as with Google's other search shortcuts, is to spare users the trouble of going to other, more specialized Web sites to get this kind of detail. But they also serve to drum up more advertising business for Google, which makes its money showing ads related to queries
