Google, one of the world’s most popular search engines, is amazingly powerful, returning fast, relevant search results for the vast majority of the billions of search queries it receives every single day. However, while Google is quite familiar to many of us, there are millions of people that are just getting started with this fantastic tool.
One of the most charming examples of this is a United Kingdom-based grandmother who typed “Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you,” into the Google search bar, politely requesting an answer to her search. This was then photographed and placed on Twitter by her amused grandson Ben, who wanted to share with the world his lovely grandmother as well as her amazingly polite Google search request.
Google Responds to Grandmother’s Polite Search Request
This tweet about a grandmother’s polite Google search went viral, and was retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, making it onto the pages of several famous celebrities. However, the best response was from Google themselves, who responded via Twitter:
Dearest Ben’s Nan.
Hope you’re well.
In a world of billions of Searches, yours made us smile.
Oh, and it’s 1998.
Thank YOU@Push10Ben
GoogleUK
Dear Grandma,
No thanks necessary.
Sincerely,
Google http://goo.gl/ZkIkmm
Google
When asked why she thought her charming query became so amazingly popular, the British grandmother responded that “the films [today] seem to be all nasty and explosions. So it might be in the back of their minds, it’s just like something a bit calming or soothing or something, I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m old enough to have gone through from the war to now … I was born in 1930, and you can imagine, there’s been so much change in the world all that time … but I don’t know if it’s for the better or not.”
Do you need to be polite to make your searches successful?
While this story about the UK grandmother asking Google to search for something using please and thank you is absolutely charming, you should know that it’s not necessary to use these polite terms in order to make your Google searches more successful.
Google has made it their mission to make sure that their search function is as easy to use as humanly possible, but there are still basic capabilities about Google’s search that can be a bit tricky to understand. How do you make sure your searches are successful, every time, with the least amount of effort? Is there a way to make Google searches more relevant to what you’re looking for?
Understanding Google: How to Search Better
Using simple search syntax – ways to frame your Google searches so that more relevant results are returned – is a simple way to boost the efficiency of your search query. There are a number of ways to do this, but some of the most simple are in this article: Simple Google Search Tricks: The Top Ten. In this easy to read a list of search tricks, readers will learn how to use quotation marks to narrow down search results, how to use Google to search within a site, how to use Google as a calculator and a dictionary, and much more.
One of the most popular activities since the Web began is simply searching for more information on other people – family, friends, professional contacts, etc. Google is a wonderful (and free!) resource for finding people around the world – here are six ways to use Google to find people online.
What if you don’t want anyone to see what you’ve been searching for – for example, say you’re looking for a special anniversary present for your spouse, and you don’t want him or her to see what you’ve been looking at so as not to spoil the surprise. You’ll want to understand how to completely clear your Google search history.
Sometimes websites are down for a wide variety of reasons, but perhaps there’s something that you really want to see on that site? You can use the Google cache command to revive a site that is temporarily down.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on what Google can do. For much more information – as well as a good primer on what Google is, how it works, and how you can make it even more useful – read Google 101 for Beginners.