Google
With Gmail, you can use a plus sign in your email address, after which you can put any characters and the email will still be delivered to your inbox. This is a great tip for spam filtering. For example, when you want to register with the New York Times, you can give them your email as: youremail+nytimes@gmail.com. Then if you start getting spam to that email address, just filter it. Note: Some websites improperly exclude the plus sign as a valid e-mail character (even though it isn't).
When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses -- one is username@gmail.com while the second email address is username@googlemail.com. Your inbox will contain all emails to both addresses. Knowing this, you can give out one version to your close friends and family and use the other to signup for web services, etc. This will easily allow you to filter, detect and delete spam.
Last November Youtube announced that they were testing out encoding videos at higher resolutions (with better audio as well). To access the higher quality video, all you have to do is add a small "tag" to the end of the existing video URLs. Try adding "&fmt=6" to the end of the address line and you can bump the resolution from 320x240 to 448x336. Add "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL, and you might get an MP4-encoded version, with better audio and a 480x360 resolution. Note: This works best with recent videos.
Shout-out: googlesystem.blogspot.com
Suggested by: Mr. Peep
Some phones are web-capable, but if yours is not you can still get a lot of information using text messages. Looking for a nearby store? Trying to get the score for the game? Trying to convert dollars to euros? Let google text you the answers, by sending a message to the number: 466453. For example, to find pizza in your zipcode send "pizza 90210", or the score of a game "score knicks", or for currency conversions "10 dollars in euros".
Shout-out: google.com
Suggested by: Naji
If you're a teen and your parents have blocked some websites here is an easy trick to fool your computer (and hopefully your parents). First, go to translate.google.com. Then, at the bottom, type in the url of the site you wish to visit. Next, set the language to something that won't be on the site you're trying to access (e.g. Russian to English). If the translator can't find any words in Russian, it won't change anything. Lastly, hit translate and the selected web page will load -- slightly slower than normal but it's worth the wait.
Suggested by: Will Urmston
Google searches are very easy to decode and as such, they are often monitored. For example, when you type "private equity jobs new york" into the google search bar, the resulting url looks like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Private+Equity+Jobs+New+York&btnG=Google+Search -- not too hard to figure out what you are up to. Luckily our friends at Digital Inspiration found a workaround, in fact they found 10. Check out their full post here. Happy Searching!
Shout-out: labnol.org
Suggested by: Naji G.
