Brave new web world: lots of clever pro tips

Chatting, getting information - nothing works without a cell phone. With a few great tricks, you can use it even faster and better.

Frau hält ihr Smartphone in den Händen© iStock
These tips will help you with Google and WhatsApp

Google

  • If you search for a person on Google, there are many results, including those in which the first name and surname appear but do not belong together. This does not happen if you put the name in quotation marks. This is also great if you only have fragments of lyrics in your head and are looking for the name of a song.
  • The minus sign is also practical. Example: You search for the predator Jaguar, but almost only get results for the car brand. Then you have to enter: jaguar -auto. This only doesn't work for images.
  • You can limit the search to certain pages or countries. To do this, type in Google, for example: site:sueddeutsche.de google. This will return everything that Süddeutsche has ever published via Google. A search for site:de will only return references to pages with a German country code.
  • Who did Angela Merkel express her confidence in during her term of office? You can search for this by entering: merkel spricht * das Vertrauen aus. It also works with words that are currently missing.

WhatsApp

  • You can quickly find photos, links and documents by tapping directly on the name at the top of the chat window. In the new window, the reference to appears in the first line: Media, links and docs. Tap on it and you will only see these.
  • WhatsApp takes up a lot of storage space. You can easily find out which chat uses the most storage space by going to: "Settings", "Data and storage usage" and then "Storage usage". The best thing is that you can also delete photos and videos - the biggest memory hogs - there.
  • Moving images in gif format are great. If you haven't just created one yourself, you can also remove them from the memory. In the chat, click on the "+" or the emoticons, then "Image gallery", where you will find the gif search. Tap and send.
  • Group chats are sometimes exhausting. If you want to reply to a message that is now much higher up, simply press and hold this message. The quote will then become part of the reply and you can comment directly.