Gaga for Google? Sample supple Soople.
Chances are you haven’t even begun to tap the power of Google. The site’s simple, elegant interface makes basic searching a snap, but hides dozens of useful features from all but expert searchers. But another search site makes using Google’s most advanced features so easy that even your mother could use them.
Soople.com contains a series of well-organized forms enabling one-click searching of Google’s most powerful features, from mathematical calculations to language translation. You can limit your search to one particular website or file type (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF). You can search among the latest news stories and look up definitions. You can use Google as a phonebook, to search by location, name or even phone number. On the Calculator page, you can even convert common measurements, calculate percentages, and perform trigonometric functions (if anyone manages to find a use for that in their reporting job, please let me know!).
Soople, for those curious, means “to soften, make supple” in an early English dialect.
“I made this site for my mother, who, though computer-savvy, still didn’t know about all the possibilities Google offers,” says Soople creator Floris Rost van Tonningen. “This site is therefore meant for all those who are not yet familiar with all the functions and required syntaxes. This way Soople enables an ‘easy expert search’!”
Indeed, Soople makes Google quite supple.
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