If you ask your average Internet surfer what Google does, they’ll tell you that “it helps you find stuff, silly.” Some may even mention that it’s good for email, maps, and maybe a couple of other things. What many do not realize is that Google has some excellent functions that aren’t always easy to find. Here is a guide to 14 of the most innovative functions that many will find useful and most will find cool.

1. Weather updates from the Google search box

Visiting a place and want to know what’s the weather there like? Open up Google and type in “weather+Your place” for a live update. Simple and easy.

Example: Vienna Weather

2. Get Local Time For Anywhere

If you want to know the time local time at anyplace worldwide all you have to do is type “What’s the time in ______”. Fill the blank with the city’s name and the local time there will be displayed.

Example: What’s the time in London?

3. When is the plane arriving or departing?

Just enter the name of airline and the flight number and Google will show you the arrival and departure times. A snappy way to check the status.

Example: American Airlines 293

4. Book your flight

Type in “city1+city2” to get links for booking your flight.

Example: Atlanta+Chicago

5. How many feet in a meter?

Trust Google to know. It will not only convert metrics, but you can get currency conversions, your bytes and bits right, among others. All you have to do is, type in the question.

Example: How many feet in a meter?

6. Google’s proxy

You can’t use Google as a proxy server but you can use Google’s cache to look at websites that are not available due to traffic congestion or blocked. Type in “cache:thewebsitetoview.com” to have a look what’s on the site.

7. Interested in music?

You can use Google as a personal music search engine.  Though a bit longer to type, but considering the results it gives, you can type -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(mp3) “Your Band” to get the search results for music.

Example: Music Search for Radio Head

8. Google for searching faces?

If you are searching for images of celebrities or famous persons whose name can have other meanings, you can try adding &imgtype=face at the end of your URL. Note: for this to work you will need to add that at the end of URL instead of putting it in your actual search.

Example: Paris

9. Is your stock up or down?

If you want to keep up with the latest stock market conditions, type “stocks:+nameofcompany” for the results.

Example: stock goog

10. Movie Ratings

And if you are interested in finding reviews about movies just type “movie:+your movie“. Google provides a meta parameter “movie” for finding details of movies. For example, if you want to search for the details of the movie The Matrix then you would have to use “movie:The Matrix”.

This would give you the information on the release year of the movie and also would show you the ratings which the movie has got from well known critic web sites. The interesting part of these reviews is that it even shows the number of positive reviews, neutral reviews and negative reviews, sorting by relevance, date and rating.

Example: movie:The Matrix

11. Find Free Stuff from Large Sites

If you want to find free stuff life wallpapers, website templates and images, Google search box gives you access to do it quickly through social bookmarking sites.

Example 1: site:delicious.com free “wallpaper”.

Example 2: site:digg.com free “wordpress templates”

12. Where’s the phonebook?

If you want to look up phonebook listing all you have to do is phonebook:CompanyName+Place or for personal listing rphonebook:NameofPerson+Place

Example for Business Phonebook: Disney CA

13. Range Search

You can search for terms withing a range by using “SearchTerm+2000..2008“.

14. Get some statistics

You can find some statistics like population of a place by just typing “population of Your Country“.

Example: Population of United States

Yahoo Tip:

Search for cheap gas on yahoo by doing a query for “cheap gas yourcity”.

Example: Cheap Gas Los Angeles