Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

Amazon.com
Everyone loves Google, and it's the first place many people turn to locate information on the Internet. There's a big gap, though, between knowing that you can use Google to get advance information on your blind date and having a handle on the considerable roster of fact-finding tools that the site makes available. Google Hacks reveals--and documents in considerable detail--a large collection of Google capabilities that many readers won't have even been aware of. Want to find the best price on a pair of leg warmers? Try the Froogle price-searcher that's hidden within the Google site. Interested in finding weblog commentary about a particular subject? Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest call your attention to the special Google syntaxes for that purpose. This book makes it clear that there's lots more to the Google site than typing in a few keywords and trusting the search engine to yield useful results.

If you're a programmer--or even just familiar with a HTML or a scripting language--Google opens up even further. A large part of Google Hacks concerns itself with the Google API (the collection of capabilities that Google exposes for use by software) and other programmers' resources. For example, the authors include a simple Perl application that queries the Google engine with terms specified by the user. They also document XooMLe, which delivers Google results in XML form. In brief, this is the best compendium of Google's lesser-known capabilities available anywhere, including the Google site itself. --David Wall

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Even if you�re on Google dozens of times a day�even if you use it for everything from finding phone numbers to pre-screening dates�you�re not even close to making the most of it. Google�s more powerful than you ever imagined, and Google Hacks will help you grab that power -- whether you�re a user, programmer, or web professional.

Sure, you can just toss in a few keywords and often get what you want -- sometimes, in the very first item, if you�re �Feeling Lucky.� But what happens when the right results don�t float to the top? The authors show how to choose smarter keywords, take advantage of Boolean searching, and master �special syntaxes� you probably didn�t know existed.

Did you know you could search a single site? (Works better than lots of individual site search engines do.) Did you know you can reverse-search phone numbers to find names? Or that you can list pages related to a specific page?

You�ll learn plenty more ways to tweak your searches: by localizing them with local jargon; by swapping word order; by using wildcards; even by duplicating search terms. And if you�re really ambitious, you can even tweak the long URL that accompanies your results page.

The authors dip deeply into an endless stream of new ideas for using Google. (Looking for an old newspaper article that costs money or isn�t online anymore? Here�s how to see if someone else has reprinted it.)

Google Hacks also offers detailed coverage of Google�s growing set of tools -- including translation; the Google Groups newsgroup collection; the handy Google toolbar; and all the �alpha� stuff cooking up in Google�s Labs. (Did you know you can search Google by phone? Experimentally, of course.)

There�s also a full chapter on third-party Google-based web tools (like GooglePeople, which answers questions like �Who�s the world�s tallest woman?�)

All this is just the beginning. If you can write a little code, Google has created a comprehensive API for integrating Google search into your own sites and applications. The authors show how to use it, with plenty of examples (most in Perl, a few in PHP, Java, Python, and other languages).

They also introduce several new third-party applications built around the Google API. For instance, if you use Word, you know its dictionary leaves much to be desired. Now, there�s CapeSpeller, which supplements Word�s spell-checker with suggestions for thousands of proper nouns and common phrases.

Along the way, you�ll find dozens of cool Google hacks and tricks. For example, here�s how to figure out your company�s �GoogleShare.� (�What percentage of �weatherman� does Al Roker hold? Who has the greater �Beatles� GoogleShare: Ringo Starr or Paul McCartney?�) Of course games like GoogleWhacking (thinking up searches with only one result) aren�t neglected, either.

If you�re a webmaster, there�s a full chapter for you -- including everything you must know about PageRank, how to buy AdWords more intelligently; even how to remove your content from Google. If you rely on Google -- and who doesn�t? -- this book is nothing short of amazing. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Everybody knows that Google is the ultimate research tool -- a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion web pages. But there's more to Google than most people know. Google is a powerful and highly customizable user interface for tapping the resources of the Internet. Google Hacks explores this unique interface, demonstrating clever ways to perform a wide variety of tasks using Google. Google also has a programming interface (API), which even non-programmers can use to automate complicated or repetitive tasks. Google Hacks is a collection of 100 tips and tools gathered from expert users of Google, as well as developers who are excited by Google's new API. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for answers. There are dozens of scripts that you can customize to write your own Google applications. You'll be amazed, if not amused, by what you can do in Google.

FROM THE CRITICS