You can actually build pretty complicated queries using Google. I could never find documentation for queries like this:

"This-is-*-(dog|cat)"

... but they work. Occasionally you might be accused of being a robot, though.

Fun!

I immediately nerd-sniped myself and started playing with factorials.

Turns out it only goes up to 170!. 170! gives you a number (170 ! = 7.25741562 × 10306). 171! searches for 171 in documents.

Still fun, and pretty darn fast, too. I thought they were probably caching the results for 1 - 170, but they return just as fast for non-integer factorials as well (try 100.2!).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial#Extension_of_factoria...)

Nice work on this, whoever did it :)

They still could be caching them. The first time they encounter a factorial, they calculate it, throw it in a DB, and it's a quick DB access from then on.

I'm using the date range search option a lot when I am getting outdated search results. Even constructed a quick search for it, so I can type something like: "gdr 30 things" which will then search for stuff from the past 30 days.

Blog post about it: http://www.pushingbits.net/posts/google-date-range-address-b...

Section 4.1 needs to be updated. When you try to use it, Google displays this message on the SERP: "The + operator has been replaced. To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks."

http://cl.ly/1w2s1F023I1s0d0N0T28 (via @waxpancake)

Another one www.google.com/ncr - sets default Google search domain from google.cc to google.com, where CC is country tld. Useful if you prefer to search in .com version and not the localized one.

great ressource

  pws=0

(turn off personalization) is missing

To clarify, one can access this by adding

   &pws=0

to the search url?

That's correct. I've got https://www.google.com/?pws=0 set as my home page.

You beat me to it. But this is and advanced search I do all the time.

There's also a nice list by Google itself that mentions some, but not all, of the features: http://www.google.com/help/features.html

Any idea what the throttling rate is on this api?

obvious mac owner is obvious