Google Hacks:
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
Book Review

By Dale Farris, Secretary Golden Triangle PC Club March 2003 General Overview Nearly everybody who now uses a computer knows that Google has become the ultimate research tool, a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion web pages. However, there is more to Google than most people know. Google is a highly powerful and highly customizable user interface for tapping into the resources of the Internet. In this super new addition to the always super collection of computer books from O'Reilly, "Google Hacks" explores this unique interface and demonstrates clever ways to perform a wide variety of tasks using Google. Google also has a programming interface (or Application Program Interface, API) which even non-programmers can use to automate complicated or repetitive tasks. In "Google Hacks," you will find 100 tips and tools (the hacks) 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 time searching for answers. There are dozens of scripts in the book that you can use to customize, in order to write your own Google applications. You will be amazed, if not also amused, by what you can do in Google, once you begin to read "Google Hacks." Special Features Use special syntaxes in Google's search box to filter results Explore Google's special services Google Directory Google Images Google News, Google Groups Google Catalogs Froogle Other interesting experiments from Google Labs Integrate Google API into your own web site Write information retrieval programs that use the Google Web API Supports Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and .NET Unusual games built on top of Google's huge database Gain clear understanding how Google looks at your site Learn more about Google's famous PageRank algorithm Contributing Writers Co-authors Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest are joined by 23 other specialist writers and information technology services firms, who contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to the book. Importance of Google Today, Google is the preeminent Internet search engine. The Google engineering team adds a foreword to this important book, indicating their honor in producing a search engine that has now served as a catalyst for many other important Web developments. They indicate their positive response to this work that will aid readers in discovering and creating new ways to search the Web. The mission of Google is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google is constantly adapting its search algorithms to match the dynamic growth and changing nature of the Web. The Google team also proudly states that virtually all members have used an O'Reilly publication to help them with their jobs, a fact not surprising to me. About Search Engines Search engines for large collections of data preceded the WWW by decades. There were massive library catalogs, hand-typed with painstaking precision on index cards and eventually, to varying degrees, automated. There were the large data collections of professional information companies, such as Dialog and LexisNexis. Then there are the still existent private, expensive medical, real estate, and legal search services. These data collections were not always easy to search, but with a little finesse and a lot of patience, it was possible to search them. Information was grouped according to established ontologies, and data performed according to particular guidelines. Then the Internet just exploded, and today practically every computer owner has their own connection to the Web. Information on the web is not all formatted the same way. Nor is it necessarily particularly accurate, nor up to date, and not spellchecked. Nonetheless, search engines began to come alive, trying to make sense of the rapidly increasing index of information available online. Eventually, special syntaxes were added for searching common parts of the average Web page, such as title or URL, and search engines quickly evolved, trying to encompass all the nuances of the billions of documents online. These search engines continue to evolve to this day. In 1998, Google came along, and searching the Internet has been forever changed. The second incarnation of a search engine service known then as BackRub, the name "Google" was a play on the work "googol," a number one followed by a hundred zeros. From its beginning, Google has been different from the other search engines, such as AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and others. The relevance of Google's search results was outstanding and worthy of comment, but more than that, Google's focus and more human face helped make it stand out online. Today, Google continues to garner fan support, and it also continues to expand with new options. There are weblogs devoted to Google, and various search engine newsletters focus on using Google, such as co-author Tara Calishain's own ResearchBuzz. Google's Hacks In April 2002, Google reached out to its fans by offering the Google API. This API gives developers a legal way to access the Google search results with automated queries. Hacks are generally considered a quick-and-dirty solution to programming problems, or interesting techniques for getting a task done. The idea of "Google Hacks" is to not give you an exhaustive manual of how every command in the Google syntax works, but rather to show you some tricks for making the best of the search engine, and show applications of the Google API that perform searches that you cannot perform using the regular Google interface. In other words, it hacks. The combination of Google's API and over 3 billion pages of constantly shifting data can do strange things to you imagination and give you lots of new perspectives on how best to search. "Google Hacks" goes beyond the instruction page to the idea of hacks, tips, tricks, and techniques you can use to make your Google searching experience more fruitful, more fun, or even just more weird. Material Covered The book begins with a nice introductory chapter on the fundamentals of Google's search properties, with tips for making the most of Google's syntaxes and specialty search engines. Then, the authors take you through using Google with several different arenas, including searching images, USENET, and news groups. Third-party services that integrate the Google API are also reviewed, along with non-API Google applications, looking at the Google API, ways to use the Google API with useful applications that do this, and even a review of pranks and games that turn Google into a poet, a mirror, and a master chef. Webmasters will most definitely want to check the chapter on how to ensure that their Web page shows up in Google search results, cleaning up for a Google visit, and how to make sure Web pages are not indexed if you don't want them there. This chapter contains essential information how Google, or any other search engine for that matter, seeks out and ranks any Web page, including handy tips for Webmasters to remember as they write the HTML code for their site and their pages. Table of Contents The eight (8) chapters include the following titles. Searching Google Google Special Services and Collection Third-Party Google Services Non-API Google Applications Introducing the Google Web API Google Web API Applications Google Pranks and Games The Webmaster Side of Google Target Readers The focus in "Google Hacks" is on improving search results using the Google search engine. In addition, the book heavily emphasizes many of the ways you can use these 100 tips (hacks) to improve your search results, as well as improving your own Web page's rank in a search performed by others using Google. The value of the book will be quickly realized by anyone heavily involved in serious searching of the Internet for information, as well as any Webmaster concerned with ensuring that their Web site gets a high ranking in a Google search. "Google Hacks" belongs in the bag of tricks of any librarian heavily involved in Internet searching, and certainly with all serious Webmasters. Book Contents 352 pages; acknowledgments; foreword from the Google engineering team; preface; figures; tips; extensive sample code scripts; index; cover colophon Authors Tara Calishain & Rael Dornfest About the Authors Tara Calishain is the author or co-author of 6 books about the Internet. She's the editor of weekly search engine newsletter ResearchBuzz (www.researchbuzz.com) and a regular columnist for LLRX.com and SEARCHER magazine. Rael Dornfest is a maven at O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., focusing on technologies just beyond the pale. He assesses, experiments, programs, and writes for the O'Reilly Network and O'Reilly publications. Rail has edited, co-authored, and contributed to various O'Reilly books. He is program chair for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, chair of the RSS-DEV Working Group, and developer of Meerkat: An Open Wire Service (meerkat.oreillynet.com). In his copious free time, Rael develops bits and bobs of freeware and maintains his raelity bytes weblog (www.raelity.org). ISBN February 2003, First Edition 0-596-00447-8 List Price $24.95 $38.95 CAN About O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. O'Reilly & Associates is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. O'Reilly communicates the knowledge of experts through their books, conferences, and web sites. Their books, known for their animals on the covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of developers building the next generation of software, and their conferences and summits bring innovators together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to the web, Linux, Open Source, and now Peer-to-Peer Networking, O'Reilly puts technologies on the map. Anyone involved in information technology can always depend on O'Reilly for high quality books, as well as the most authoritative works on the market. The company's commitment to technical expertise in their books is matched by their commitment to quality production, now famously recognized by their "lay flat" binding that makes reading an O'Reilly book very convenient. 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