GOOGLE CAN COOK: Try this. Look into your refrigerator at what you have. Now punch all of the ingredients into Google’s search box and add recipe to it. In less than a second, the algorithm will return a few thousand innovative ways on how to put the ingredients to good use. The idea first occurred to software programmer Judy Hourihan. She was so enamoured by it that she created a tweak to look up recipes on Google. Available on http://www.researchbuzz.org / t o o l s / c o o k i n - w i t h - google.shtml, you can even choose what kind of recipe you want. General? Diabetic friendly? Vegetarian? Or even a ‘crockpot’ one!

GOOGLE CAN DATE: Since the time Google Maps and Google Earth was launched, a mania of sorts has swept the world. The outcome is a series of tools that marry the maps with some clever programming to create an altogether new interface that lets you do some ingenious things. Sit back and wait now for somebody looking for a date from your city to touch base with you. If that doesn’t sound like much fun, click on pins that have been placed by other lonely hearts like you and jabber away. Who knows what may come of it!

GOOGLE CAN FOLLOW: Dating is just one of the many fun applications. What you can do is restricted only by your imagination. So, there’s this bloke who uses Google Maps to track the International Space Station. Try http://gmaps.tommangan.us to figure out where exactly it is orbiting right now. If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, try http://fboweb.com. This site is meant for aviation professionals. It uses Google Maps at the backend to figure out what flight path a commercial craft takes. It also tells you where a flight is right now and what time it is expected to arrive at its destination. No clue how it’s done. And full access to the service costs $10 a month. On a more mundane note, t r y http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~cip riani/bighole.php?lang=en. This too uses Google Maps. Click at any point on the map where you’d love to dig. And the tool will dig the deepest tunnel possible to find out where the hole will end. Digging a hole in Mumbai, incidentally, will eventually open up in the Pacific Ocean. No clue what good it serves. But it exists nevertheless.

GOOGLE CAN READ: Thanks to this new tool, the world is split into two camps. Those who think Google’s got a great thing on its hands and those who think it’s just another Google ploy at world domination. Whatever side of the camp you are on, do head to http://print.google.com. This is where Google is attempting to scan every book in the world that has ever been printed and making it available to the world. The full text of books unprotected by copyrights are available to read. As for those protected by copyrights, you can still search the insides and relevant passages will be thrown up.

GOOGLE CAN ANSWER: So you want to know how much 10 pounds is in kilos? Type something as innocuous as “10 pounds to kilos” and Google will tell you in half a second that it is equal to 4.5359237 kilograms. Any metric conversion can be done similarly. The same thing can be done with currency. And if you don’t know the unit of any currency, fret not. Simply punch in something as basic as “100 Indian money to Chinese money”— sounds rather awkward, but it works. Google informs us it is 17.701482 Chinese Yuan. So there. A conversion and an education.

And if it answers to fairly straight questions you’re looking at, ask it as if you were in a classroom. “Where is Rwanda,” for instance, will throw up an equally precise “Location: Central Africa, east of Democratic Republic of the Congo”. Try “what is a steam engine”. You’ll be told upfront that “A steam engine is a heat engine that makes use of the thermal energy that exists in steam, converting it to mechanical work.” Even a question as stupid as “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” met with an equally stupid answer. “As much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” Cool, eh?