A screenshot of the homepage of www.snaptu.com

All of us use Google. But how many of us know the hidden tricks to get very useful results? I chanced upon some of them while experimenting with different combinations.

Here are a few of them:

Movie show times

Go to www.google.com /movies. Type in your location on the top of the page (for example: New Delhi or Calcutta). Put a check mark on Remember Location and lo and behold you will get the full listing of movies in New Delhi or Calcutta, or any city of your choice, with their show times! The movies have stars next to them according to reviews written by different people. Click on Reviews and you can, at times, get a particularly good analysis. But be careful, some of the reviews can be real spoilers: they give away the surprise twists and turns in the film and even the ending.

Time

Would you like to find out the time in a particular city? All you have to do is insert “What time is it in Melbourne” (without the quotes) in the Google search bar. You will get an answer like “1:00pm Monday (EST) — Time in Melbourne, Victoria”.

Currency converter

This is one of my best queries. All I ask Google is what is the going rate of the US dollar versus the Indian rupee. Your query should be structured like this: 1 US dollar in Indian rupees. It does not matter whether you type in lower case or in capital letters. Your answer will be something like: 1 U.S. dollar = 49.0701212 Indian rupees. Or you could write “49 USD in Indian rupees”. It will tell you the value in the Indian currency.

Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, travelling abroad, or building a PC. Just type “quarter cup in teaspoons”. The answer is “1 quarter US cup = 12 US teaspoonfuls”. Want to find out how many seconds there are in a year? Go ahead and type in “seconds in year”. Out comes the result “1 year = 31 556 926 seconds”. For geekier men, there’s “bits in kilobytes”. Then “155473 bytes in kilobytes” will give you the correct figure of 155473 bytes = 151.829102 kilobytes.

Track flight status

Just write “Kingfisher 605” (which is the Delhi to Calcutta flight). I can vouch for an accurate result because I recently travelled to Delhi and was constantly checking the browser on my mobile phone for the status of the flight.

Reader’s tip: Dr Kausik Basu has given us a wonderful tip about a mobile application called Snaptu (www. snaptu.com). This all in one application gives you Facebook, AccuWeather, Cricinfo, Google Calendar, News and Blogs, Picassa and Reuters among many others. I have tried it and it is pretty good.

Send in your computer-related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon.