Google Search is adding two experimental features to its service to help everyone around the world pronounce things correctly. Here's how to use it.

It’s a busy day at the office and your left eye has been twitching uncontrollably. So, out of curiosity and irritation you Google it.

Various benign causes — stress, exhaustion, too much caffeine — put your mind at ease initially. But you don’t stop there. Soon, you find out eye twitches could be a symptom of something more sinister, causing you to panic.

Our monkey brains didn’t evolve to understand big numbers without some help. So when you run into an abstract figure, it’s good to have some real-world thing to compare it to. That’s why I memorise a few stats about the U.S. population; that’s why we made a video comparing Jeff Bezos’s money to Beyoncé’s. When you need to visualise a certain number, large or small, search it on Wolfram Alpha, and you’ll get a comparison to some real-world objects.

Custom search engines are one of the coolest features of any modern browser. With just a few keystrokes, you can search Wikipedia right from your address bar, do a custom Google search for Lifehacker articles, or even get driving directions to a specific location.

The Tip of My Tongue subreddit has been helping people remember things for ten years. Next time you can’t remember the name of a movie, a song, a GIF, a book, a stop-motion video turning 20th-century warfare into a food fight... whatever it is, come here and ask.

The internet is full of crap. For every piece of reputable information you'll find countless rumours, misinformation and downright falsehoods. Separating truth from fiction is equal parts a mental battle and diligent research. Here's how to make sure you never get duped.

Google's search engine is an always-expanding, extremely useful tool that's packed with tons of different tools. Over on Zapier, they outline tons of different advanced tricks for searching Google as quickly as possible.

It feels great to buy someone something they specifically want, while still keeping it a surprise. If you’re trying to find the perfect gift for a friend or colleague, the answer is in your chats, emails, and social media: search their messages for the phrase “I want.”

iOS: Ever read a paper book and wish you could hit Ctrl-F? Use the free iOS app SearchCam to search through printed text using your phone’s camera. It works on documents, books, packaging, even posters.

Not everyone has the time to follow politics as closely as others, especially if you're in another country. Much as we'd like to avoid it, Australia has a stake in the U.S. 2020 election and understanding a bit more about U.S. politics and the stances of political representatives can be useful. If you want to stay on top of all the happenings, a site like Categorized Tweets give you a helping hand.

Search Best Sellers is a shopping site that helps you find the bestseller lists for every product category on Amazon. As the site explains, while Amazon keeps a list for the most popular products in hundreds of categories, it doesn’t let you search for these lists. Search Best Sellers does.

When you join a new job, there’s a lot you need to learn beyond the official orientation. You need to figure out your unspoken responsibilities, the relationships between people and departments, and a little of the office gossip. If your workplace uses the chat app Slack, you can pick up a lot of that info by searching the archives. You don’t have time to read everything everyone wrote, so here’s how to find the most important (and juicy) stuff.

Android: How do you normally share search results from Google with your friends? I confess, I’ve never copied-and-pasted the gigantic URL for the results page to anyone else; I usually just use the deliciously passive-aggressive “lmgtfy.com” to help them out. Maybe I’m a jerk.

Versus is a tiny website that does a tiny thing, and it does it very well. Enter a product or service — or anything at all — and Versus will tell you the alternatives.

Search for Photoshop, and you’ll get comparable Adobe products Lightroom and Illustrator, and the competitors Gimp, Affinity, Procreate, Krita and Pixlr. It’s useful if you frequently want alternatives to an expensive product or service — especially if you turn Versus into one of your browser’s built-in search engines.

Chrome: Sometimes you just never want to see a certain site in your Google results. Maybe you want to block a sketchy news source, or you don’t want Pinterest in your image search results, or there’s a really gross forum that keeps appearing in searches. Thankfully, you can block a site from future searches with the uBlacklist Chrome extension.

The latest and greatest version of Google Chrome makes changes that most people won’t likely notice, such as tweaks to how the browser loads pages and images. One feature that most folks will notice, however, is the images that pop up when you make searches in Chrome’s address bar, or “Omnibox.”

Google has redesigned the way search results on mobile devices are presented, making website branding more overt. The company says this will help users to better understand where information is coming from with the name of the website and its icon appearing at the top of the results.

Which sounds good until you check the fine print and understand that this is a move towards having branded ads and online shopping made more prominent in search results.

The internet, as a “place” is constantly growing. We build more and more webpages every day — so many, in fact, that it can feel as if certain corners of it are lost to time.

Confession time. This week’s Ask Lifehacker is a bit of a head-scratcher, because the wide world of PDFs is confusing, at best, and typically more frustrating than anything else. There are a ton of different apps you can find that let you open, edit, and mess around with PDFs. Some of them are free and meh, a few of them are free and awesome, and most cost anything from a mild to an outrageous amount of money.