P hrase your question in the form of an answer. So instead of typing, "What is the average rainfall in the Amazon basin?", you might get better results by typing "The average rainfall in the Amazon basin is."

§ T his is an old one, but very important: Put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. If you put quotes around "electric curtains," Google won't waste your time finding one set of Web pages containing the word "electric" and another set containing the word "curtains."


§ Similarly, put a hyphen right before any word you want screened out. If you're looking up dolphins, for example, you'll have to wade through a million Miami Dolphins pages unless you search for "dolphins - Miami."


§ Google is a global White Pages and Yellow Pages. Search for "phonebook:home depot norwalk , ct," Google instantly produces the address and phone number of the Norwalk Home Depot. This works with names ("phonebook:robert jones las vegas, NV") as well as businesses.


§ Don't put any space after "phonebook." And in all of the following examples, don't type the quotes I'm showing you here.


§ Google is a package tracker. Type a FedEx or UPS package number (just the digits); when you click Search, Google offers a link to its tracking information.


§ Google is a calculator. Type in an equation ("32+2345*3-234=").


§ Google is a units-of-measurement converter. Type "teaspoons in a gallon," for example, or "centimeters in a foot."


§ Google is a stock ticker. Type in AAPL or MSFT, for example, to see a link to the current Apple or Microsoft stock price, graphs, financial news and so on.


§ Google is an atlas. Type in an area code, like 212, to see a Mapquest map of the area.


§ Google is Wal-Mart's computer. Type in a UPC bar code number, such as "036000250015," to see the description of the product you've just "scanned in." (Thanks to the Google Blog,

http://google.blogspace.com , for this tip and the next couple.)


§ G oogle is an aviation buff. Type in a flight number like "United 22" for a link to a map of that flight's progress in the air. Or type in the tail number you see on an airplane for the full registration form for that plane.


§ Google is the Department of Motor Vehicles. Type in a VIN (vehicle identification number, which is etched onto a plate, usually on the door frame, of every car), like "JH4NA1157MT001832," to find out the car's year, make and model.


§ For hours of rainy-day entertainment, visit http://labs.google.com . Here, you'll find links to new, half-finished Google experiments-like Google Voice, in which you call (650) 623-6706, speak the words you want to search for and then open your browser to view the results. Disclaimer: It wasn't working when I tried it. (Ditto a lot of these experiments.)

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.

John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality.

The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates. AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization and logic.

AI research also overlaps with tasks such as robotics, control systems, scheduling, data mining, logistics, speech recognition, facial recognition and many others. Computational intelligence Computational intelligence involves iterative development or learning (e.g., parameter tuning in connectionist systems).

Learning is based on empirical data and is associated with non-symbolic AI, scruffy AI and soft computing.

Subjects in computational intelligence as defined by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society mainly include: Neural networks: trainable systems with very strong pattern recognition capabilities. Fuzzy systems: techniques for reasoning under uncertainty, have been widely used in modern industrial and consumer product control systems; capable of working with concepts such as 'hot', 'cold', 'warm' and 'boiling'. Evolutionary computation: applies biologically inspired concepts such as populations, mutation and survival of the fittest to generate increasingly better solutions to the problem.

These methods most notably divide into evolutionary algorithms (e.g., genetic algorithms) and swarm intelligence (e.g., ant algorithms). With hybrid intelligent systems, attempts are made to combine these two groups.

Expert inference rules can be generated through neural network or production rules from statistical learning such as in ACT-R or CLARION.

It is thought that the human brain uses multiple techniques to both formulate and cross-check results.

Thus, systems integration is seen as promising and perhaps necessary for true AI, especially the integration of symbolic and connectionist models..

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When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk. ~ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Top 10 Google Search Tricks

1. When it comes to the Google search box, you already know the tricks: finding exact phrases matches using quotes like "so say we all" or searching a single site using site:lifehacker.com gmail. But there are many more oblique, clever, and lesser-known search recipes and operators that work from that unassuming little input box. Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, but today we're skipping the obvious and highlighting our favorite obscure Google web search tricks.

2. What time is it in Bangkok right now? Ask Google. Enter simply what time is it to get the local time in big cities around the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like what time is it hong kong to get the local time there.

3. Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google's search results

4. Google's powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you're cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.

5. Compare items with "better than" and find similar items with "reminds me of"

Reader Adam taps the wisdom of the crowds by searching for like items using key phrases. He writes in:
Simply search for, in quotes: "better than _keyword_"
Some example results:

Results 1 - 100 of about 550 English pages for " better than WinAmp".

Results 1 - 57 of 57 English pages for " better than mIRC".

Results 1 - 100 of about 17,500 English pages for " better than Digg". (Wow. Poor Digg.)

The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you're searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, " reminds me of _someband_" or "sounds like _someband_" will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good, no-name musicians you'd probably never know of otherwise.

Examples:

Results 1 - 88 of 88 English pages for " reminds me of Metallica".

Results 1 - 36 of 36 English pages for " similar to Garden State".

Results 1 - 66 of 66 English pages for " sounds like The Shins".


Just get creative and you'll, without a doubt, find cool new stuff you probably never knew existed.


6. Remove affiliate links from product searches
When you're sick of seeing duplicate product search results from the likes of eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, clear 'em out by stacking up the -site:ebay.com -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com operator. Alternately, check out Give Me Back My Google (original post), a service that does all that known reseller cleaning up for you when you search for products. Compare this GMBMG search for a Cruzer 1GB flash drive to the regular Google results.

7. Find related terms and documents
Ok, this one's direct from any straight-up advanced search operator cheat sheet, but it's still one of the lesser-used tricks in the book. Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.

8. Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your personal Napster. Go ahead, try this search for Nirvana tracks: -inurlhtm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana". (Sub out Nirvana for the band you're interested in; use this one in conjunction with number 7 to find new music, too.) The same type of search recipe can find comic books as well.

9. ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search
Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word. Don't know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named "Priti" who you're emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you forgot what "corazon" is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term's about.

10. If you're doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don't want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google's Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.
What's your favorite ninja Google search technique? Tell us about it in the comments.

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~It is possible to fail in many ways...while to succeed is possible only in one way.~