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Google Hacks: Tips and Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information (Hacks)
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by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, and Tara Calishain
Sales Rank: 61057
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Discount: 34 %
List Price: $24.99
$16.49
At Amazon
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Paperback: 543 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 3 edition August 3, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596527063
ISBN-13: 978-0596527068
Product Dimensions:
8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Product Review
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
Topics covered: How to get the most from the Google search engine by using its Web-accessible features (including product searches, image searches, news searches, and newsgroup searches) and the large collection of desktop-resident toolbars available, as well as its advanced search syntax. Other sections have to do with programming with the Google API and simple "scrapes" of results pages, while further coverage addresses how to get your Web page to feature prominently in Google keyword searches.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
Everyone knows that Google lets you search billions of web pages. But few people realize that Google also gives you hundreds of cool ways to organize and play with information.
Since we released the last edition of this bestselling book, Google has added many new features and services to its expanding universe: Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Blog Search, Video Search, Music Search, Google Base, Google Reader, and Google Desktop among them. We've found ways to get these new services to do even more.
The expanded third edition of Google Hacks is a brand-new and infinitely more useful book for this powerful search engine. You'll not only find dozens of hacks for the new Google services, but plenty of updated tips, tricks and scripts for hacking the old ones. Now you can make a Google Earth movie, visualize your web site traffic with Google Analytics, post pictures to your blog with Picasa, or access Gmail in your favorite email client. Industrial strength and real-world tested, this new collection enables you to mine a ton of information within Google's reach. And have a lot of fun while doing it: - Search Google over IM with a Google Talk bot
- Build a customized Google Map and add it to your own web site
- Cover your searching tracks and take back your browsing privacy
- Turn any Google query into an RSS feed that you can monitor in Google Reader or the newsreader of your choice
- Keep tabs on blogs in new, useful ways
- Turn Gmail into an external hard drive for Windows, Mac, or Linux
- Beef up your web pages with search, ads, news feeds, and more
- Program Google with the Google API and language of your choice
For those of you concerned about Google as an emerging Big Brother, this new edition also offers advice and concrete tips for protecting your privacy. Get into the world of Google and bend it to your will!
Customer Reviews & Comments
This review is from: Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Paperback)
Google is powerful for basic searches, which most people conduct by entering a few keywords and letting Google do the rest. Imagine the possibilities especially researchers, students, writers, professionals, and anyone who need to find specific or obscure information just by learning a few tricks. Entering _book reviews_ pulls out any resource having both words in it, not necessarily together as a phrase. Add quotes to "book reviews" and the results display sites with book reviews together as a phrase. This hardly unleashes Google's power. Even entering the keywords in a specific order can affect the results. You can search around Google's Web site to learn lesser known tips and tricks, but you won't find most of the hacks on the Internet without, ironically, hard searching. As a fervent reader, too often I read well-written books and never take the time to apply the tools and techniques. While reading this one, I immediately put the newfound knowledge to use with cool results and still use it though it's been a few weeks since I opened the book. You may be aware Google offers Google News, which searches and provides the latest news (http://news.google.com/). But did you know Google News supports two syntaxes? They are "intitle" and "site." "Intitle" searches for keywords within the headline or new item's title while "site" looks for the keyword in a specific site. The authors are straightforward when they mention Google News is not one of the best places for news. Non-techies, don't let the fact that O'Reilly and Associates is the publisher scare you away because the company's books are often synonymous with high tech topics and the name "hacks" in its title. It doesn't mean "bad" as a hack is also known as a trick or add-on for adding more power to a program or system. The tech-speak is kept to a minimum, which makes the hacks easy to read and reference. The book has tips for beginners, moderate users, and experts and each hack is represented by thermometer's temperature (high for expert and low for easy) for easy reference. Techies and programmers have nothing to fear as the book covers APIs (Application Programming Interface), which provide a basic building block for building software applications. In other words, Google Web APIs (http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html) allow developers to query Google's search tool for use in developing software that accesses the many Web sites through Google. For example, a Web site providing the latest news on books and the book industry could use the Google API to regularly update the site with any new news relating to books. APIs for PHP, Python, ASP, C#, .NET, VB, and Java are included. Try out some of the hacks and get tips from other readers from the O'Reilly's Hacks Web site (http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/ht/2) and Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz buzztoolbox (http://www.buzztoolbox.com/google/). Reduce the time you spend sifting through garbage by hacking your way with Google using this book.
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Google Hacks: Tips and Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information (Hacks)
List Price: $24.99
Discount: 34 %
Available from Amazon
Price: $16.49
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