I just clicked on a banner ad for Google which featured the cookie monster on it, more out of interest to see what the cookie monster was doing there than anything else. On clicking on the ad, you are taken to a page which asks whether you want to make google.com your home page. I did this, then was taken to a Google Search Tips page.

Nowm, I already know about some of the search tricks you can do in Google like metric conversion "inches in a meter" will tell you how many inches there are in a meter, and "dollars to UK Pounds" will display the current UK US conversion rates. Other tricks use keywords to activate the feature, eg "define: long tail keywords" will show a definition for the phrase 'long tail keywords'. The search tips page shows you a whole lot more that I didnt know about. Interested in earthquake activity? Put "earthquakes" into google and it will show you a list of recent earthquakes , their location and magnitude (at least thats what google search tips says, when I tried it I just got the normal serps with wikipaedia at the top).

Maybe some of these search tips are available only in the US, which is a shame because some of them look really useful. My disappointment was short lived when I noticed a small link on the left hand side which said "wonder wheel" - this is a great tool which shows semanticaly similar works you can navigate too with lovely animated connected bubbles. Note, it works much smoother in firefox than it does in IE9.