• Lifehacker, Thursday, January 3, 2008 1:45 PM

Gina Trapani digs up some of the lesser-known tweaks searchers can use to find info on Google, from finding the time in various locales by entering "what time is it" in the search box, to tracking a flight's status by searching for the airline and flight number -- and getting the departure, arrival and on-time info (via flightstatus.com) as the first result.

Some of these hacks are aimed at making it easier to shop online, like the "-site:" parameter, which lets users remove specific sites from the crawl (typically affiliate resellers like eBay, mammoth sites like Amazon, or others) when added at the end of their query. So a search for a "1GB flash drive" gets stripped of all duplicate entries from buy.com if the user enters "1GB flash drive -site:buy.com."

Trapani also highlights the power of Google's automatic converter, which can give answers to questions like "how many seconds in a year," and "how many Euros is 20USD," as well as the "better than" or "reminds me of" parameters. Users type (in quotes) "better than 'x'" or "reminds me of 'x'" -- and the Google bot brings back results that contain "better than All Clad" or "reminds me of Metallica" in the copy.

Read the whole story at Lifehacker »