An insider's guide to Google

Read an article with the same title in TOI a couple of days ago. Tried hard to find a link to the article in the TOI site but couldn't locate it. Really was a nice article explaining what google is really capable of doing. Here is a list of things mentioned

• Google can cook - enter the ingredients and it will give you a recipe. May be a list of ways in which the specified things can be put to good use
• Google can aid you in performing conversions - enter 100 Indian rupees to yen and it promptly tells you 100 Indian rupees = 259.729417 Japanese yen. And you are not to worry if you do not know what is the currency of a country. Type something like Indian money to say Japanese money and it can still come up with an answer. Sounds a little awkward but serves the purpose
• Google can track the movement of flights - using google maps, someone has developed a site which will give you the path a plane will take from a specified source to destination. It can also tell you the whereabouts of a given flight
• One more site that uses google maps in the background - pick any spot on earth and start digging. It will dig the deepest possible hole and tell you where you will end up. The writer's comment - wonder what purpose it serves but nevertheless it exists http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~cipriani/bighole.php?lang=en
• And google is trying to put every book that has ever been printed on the web. Those books that are not copyright protected are already there. Don't know about those that are protected. Think we can still search and get pages from those books.

Interesting applications all these. Will have to find a link to the article.

Found a whole list of other things you can do with google maps - click here to find out