Have you ever wanted to set a quick timer or stopwatch for something while you are on the internet or somehow you seem not to find one in a short time? In case you didn’t know, the Google Search homepage lets users set a custom timer by simply typing ‘Set timer for X minutes or hours in the search box. It doubles up as a stopwatch for those wanting to count up. 

Google introduced the feature almost a decade ago in August of 2013. The handy timer and stopwatch that you can use right from Search have returned. The tools have been unavailable for weeks, but Google public search liaison Danny Sullivan announced that the timer was back in a tweet a few days ago.

What is Google Timer?

Google Timer is an inbuilt stopwatch, alarm, and countdown. It also shows a live clock of your time zone if configured.

Google first introduced the timer and stopwatch in 2013, but reports indicated they disappeared from search results sometime in mid-July. On August 1st, Sullivan confirmed in a tweet to The Verge that they were unavailable due to an “issue” and that the team expected to bring them back “fairly soon.” Now that they’re back, you can time things to your heart’s content once more.

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How to use the Google Timer?

To use the timer, just type “set a timer for [however long you need],” and the top result will be a timer that automatically starts to count down. If you want to edit the timer, click on the numbers counting down.

Go to the search engine homepage and simply type; For example

“set timer for 3 days”

You could choose to do minutes, hours, etc.

How to use the Google Stopwatch?

To use the stopwatch, Google “stopwatch” and click the “start” button on the box that appears. You can also tab back and forth between the timer and the stopwatch if one of them already appears in your search results.

To use the stopwatch, you could simply toggle between tabs, Timer, and Stopwatch.

Alternatively, you could search; “google stopwatch”

See my set timer here.

Conclusion

All the way back in 2013, Google introduced a nifty little feature in its search engine tool that had nothing to do with search at all. I started using the online tool two years back to time myself when am reading online, or doing something. You too can find a purpose with this free tool, especially the stopwatch.