Let me tell you a little story. It’s one you’ve probably heard before. After a break-in at my home over the summer left my teen-age kids without computers, I attempted to buy new Dell laptops. While the Dell website was easy to work with, their delivery schedules were not. Dell postponed deliver four times, so I cancelled the order and bought a couple HP laptops from my local Staples store. Of course, the story gets even better when one of the laptops spontaneously decided that it had no operating system present. Based on some feedback from my MVP buddies, I decided to see what the overall level of discomfort with various laptop providers happened to be. So I googled on several code strings to see how many hits I got: HP laptop hell: 351,000 hits Dell laptop hell: 305,000 hits Toshiba laptop hell: 262,000 hits Lenova laptop hell: 138,000 hits Uh oh! This doesn’t look good for my choice in hardware. And if I know anything in the IT world is certain, then I know that Google does not lie. Time to kick in the warranty. Now here’s the kicker, what if want to know these same metrics broken down differently? You can use the advanced Google search property called View:Timeline to see the number of hits per year over time! The syntax, when typing it into the Google search box, is “what I want to search” view:timeline. It translates directly into a URL as: http://www.google.com/views?hl=en&q="dell+hell"+view:timeline&sa=N&ct=tlrfilt Looking for other great advanced Google search tips & tricks? Try this: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=advanced&hl=en In addition, I also recommend the book Google Hacks, published by O’Reilly & Associates. Enjoy, -Kevi
