Synergistic Elements of Google

Google Chrome Extensions

        

     The internet can be used in many different ways which can be used to search for anything and everything. I didn't really realize how much was on Google until I had class the other day and we went into some depth about the different features such as Google extensions, Google newspapers, and Google alerts. A lot of the stuff that is posted on the internet is pretty much irreversible in terms of your digital footprint because when something is put out on the internet, anyone can view it at any time. When I added the chrome extension chrome remote desktop, I literally could go on my phone at school and see what I was browsing on my home computer screen. It was super helpful and easy to use because of the portability. Like what we mentioned in class, the extension makes it possible to pick up where you left off if you were to travel incredibly far from your at-home desktop. 

    Additionally, another extension that I found was interesting was the uBlock Origin, which basically eliminates all unwanted content and tracking. However, for me, I personally use AdBlock because a few of my friends had recommended it to me a while back before I've even found out about uBlock Origin. Nonetheless, like AdBlock, uBlock Origin has mostly the same features and gives you the statistical data on how many ads were blocked on a certain page and how many ads were blocked since the initial download. The few differences between uBlock Origin versus AdBlock is that uBlock is more of a content blocker rather than an ad blocker, and it also helps with the efficiency of the memory card and CPU of the computer. 

    The final chrome extension that I recently found out about was OneTab. It groups your tabs from Google chrome into one single tab so that you won't have to scroll through tons of tabs to find the website you were looking for. When we talked about it in class, I felt like I NEEDED this extension because of how many tabs I usually have open with regards to schoolwork or browsing online for YouTube videos or even shopping on PacSun. This extension keeps my Google chrome organized and reduces the amount of stress when looking for a website that you don't even know where it went. The single list of tabs can also be exported to a .HTML file to be saved, which is an amazing feature because sometimes you need to transport a few tabs to another computer or device. 

Google Docs

    When writing essays for school, I normally use Google Docs because of its accessibility. However, I did not know that there were so many features of it. These features include voice typing, research, automatic organization, and document outlines. I wish I knew about the voice typing feature when I was writing my essay last semester for a class while I was mostly not home, which made it hard to clearly write everything down. With the voice typing feature, I would've been able to talk and easily wrote my whole essay in under a few hours. 

    The research that you can do on Google Docs is incredible because the "research" section is literally on Google Docs, which means that you don't even have to leave the site to find something. In class, we talked about Google Scholar and how all those articles are peer-reviewed so there wouldn't be any faux information. I love how the research you can do on Google Docs is everything that is found on Google Scholar, which is amazing because there won't be any false information and unpeered-reviewed articles.

    Other than that, I also found out that there is a feature that allows you to tag other users to get their attention, which is quite helpful because instead of emailing the person, you could just tag them in the comments and they would get a notification right away. If I had known this earlier, it would have saved me time in trying to email my peers to get them to read my essay. Google Docs is useful in so many ways and has so many features that you might not even know about. Personally, I thought I was an expert with Google Docs and its features, but I was so wrong about that. I found many of these features resourceful with regards to anything I do with Google Docs. 

Google Search

    During my whole time using Google search, I didn't know that you could do so many things to adjust and tailor the search to what you need. For example, I knew that you can use quotes to search for something specific, but I didn't know that you could use a hyphen to exclude words. For example, if I needed something for school, I would search up "Biology articles" and if I didn't want articles to be searched for specifically, it would just be "biology -articles". This is pretty useful because like we talked about in class, when you want to purchase a specific car such as a Ford Mustang, you can use quotes to look for it without anything that is similar. 

    Additionally, if you want to look for something specific on a site, you can just type whatever you want to look for, then type in "site:_______". The other day, I looked up "Alkene reactions  site:Leah4Sci.com". This led me to the alkene reaction page on her website, thus I was able to learn about the different addition alkene reactions to do well on my quiz for Organic Chemistry. 

    A similar trick to find something specific to what you're looking for is to put related in front of the specific site that you're trying to relate to and then press enter. Just like before I studied for my Organic Chemistry quiz, I put in related:Leah4Sci.com" which basically showed me multiple websites that are similar to what she had put out. It helped me a bunch because if I didn't understand something on Leah's site, I would be able to look at another site and grasp the concept a little better. 

To be completely honest, if I didn't learn about all of these Google features in class last week, I wouldn't have done as well as I did on my Organic Chemistry quiz. I felt as if the Google search features allowed me to maximize the efficiency of studying and reading new information regarding addition alkene reactions. 

Last Words

    All of these features of Google were made from scratch and now helps millions of people all over the world with many different things. For me particularly, I use the features of Google Docs, Google search, and the Google Chrome extensions because those are the only few things that I really use on a daily basis. The variety of features that Google has to offer are the basic elements that go well hand-in-hand synergistically to build a foundation of Google to be an amazing website and search engine. I think that without these features, it would take a very long time to do some of the things we do so fast nowadays, like searching for specific things and researching in Google Docs. The extensions that Google has to offer allows users to specifically block ads or to remotely access where they left off hundreds of miles away from their home desktop. Other than that, I think that Google Chrome has immensely improved over the years and gives the opportunity for extreme growth in regards to user input and facilitation of using the sites and features of Google.