5 Secret Ways to Use Your Favorite Sites

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- Web sites are many-layered entities, and if you look beneath the surface you'll find all sorts of surprises.

And we're not talking about Easter eggs, those cute little hidden treats Google made famous (do a Google search for "let it snow" or "do a barrel role," for instance). Rather, we refer to important functionality and interesting features that for one reason or another are largely undiscovered by the public at large.

For the most part, these "secrets" aren't deliberately hidden from users. But companies have to make strategic choices about what links and functions are presented on the front page of their sites, and some stuff inevitably misses the cut. It sometimes takes a bit of clicking around to stumble upon a page or setting that most users overlook.

Here are a few pages and functions from the world's most popular sites that you may have overlooked.