Internet

3 Cool Things You Can Do Online That Everyone Can Appreciate

The internet contains billions of web pages, each packed with information to inform, confuse or entertain us. There is just so much of it that unless you were specifically looking for something, you might miss a few gems that can make your day that much better.

The following certainly aren’t hacks or anything you have to be overly ‘techy’ to appreciate, and in fact, the first one might be of particular use if you in the habit of binge-watching movies for hours.

1. Never miss a vital part of a movie because you need a toilet break

If you’ve ever sat there ‘sort of’ watching a movie but not really, because you’re more worried about what might be happening ‘downstairs’ then you should take time to discover the Runpee app. It has a large database of movies but also has a list of 3-5 minute scenes you can miss without worrying you’ve not seen something vital to the plot.

More than just a timer to make sure you don’t spend the next half hour of the movie asking what’s going on, it also lets you know if there are after credit scenes worth hanging around for.

2. Use alternate search engines to find what you actually want

As hard as it is to believe, Google doesn’t have the answer to everything. If you are looking for something particularly niche or industry-specific, Google, with its billions of indexed pages, might actually have too much information. The result is that you spend hours sorting through stacks of semi-relevant information and not finding what you are actually looking for.

There are alternate, niche-specific search engines that do in-depth searches relevant to what you are looking for so you could use one of those. For instance, if you were looking for music or images, you could use for free, then use CCsearch. If you are looking for electrical components that are discontinued, then you could use Octopart’s alternate part number search to source what you were looking for.

There are also search engines for people who do odd jobs in your area and more academic-based answers than you might not find using the Google search algorithm.

3. Find out what websites used to look like back in the day

The Wayback Machine is more than just a bit of fun, as you can use this to see how the sites of major brands have developed over the years and see the lessons they learned at each stage. Searching for a competitor’s website five or ten years ago and see which features were added and are still there can help inform people when they go to build their own website.

You can also use this to see which website designs they used and why and when they re-branded. If used correctly, this can be a valuable market research tool, as well as being amusing when you look at all of the old-school graphics that got used back in the day.

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