Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools 1st Edition

by Tara Calishain (Author), Rael Dornfest (Author)

38 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0596004477

ISBN-10: 0596004478

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Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information
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The Internet puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, and all you have to know is how to find it. Google is your ultimate research tool--a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion web pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million searches a day. The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off the Web. You've got a cadre of techniques up your sleeve--tricks you've learned from practice, from exchanging ideas with others, and from plain old trial and error--but you're always looking for better ways to search. It's the "hacker" in you: not the troublemaking kind, but the kind who really drives innovation by trying new ways to get things done. If this is you, then you'll find new inspiration (and valuable tools, too) in Google Hacks from O'Reilly's new Hacks Series.

Google Hacks is a collection of industrial-strength, real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. The book offers a variety of interesting ways for power users to mine the enormous amount of information that Google has access to, and helps you have fun while doing it. You'll learn clever and powerful methods for using the advanced search interface and the new Google API, including how to build and modify scripts that can become custom business applications based on Google. Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers.

Written by experts for intelligent, advanced users, O'Reilly's new Hacks Series have begun to reclaim the term "hacking" for the good guys. In recent years the term "hacker" has come to be associated with those nefarious black hats who break into other people's computers to snoop, steal information, or disrupt Internet traffic. But the term originally had a much more benign meaning, and you'll still hear it used this way whenever developers get together. Our new Hacks Series is written in the spirit of true hackers--the people who drive innovation.

If you're a Google power user, you'll find the technical edge you're looking for in Google Hacks.

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Rael Dornfest

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

About the Author

Tara Calishain is the creator of the site, ResearchBuzz. She is an expert on Internet search engines and how they can be used effectively in business situations.

Rael Dornfest is a Researcher at the O'Reilly & Associates focusing on technologies just beyond the pale. He assesses, experiments, programs, and writes for the O'Reilly network and O'Reilly publications. Dornfest is Program Chair of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Chair of the RSS-DEV Working Group, and developer of Meerkat: An Open Wire Service. In his copious free time, he develops bits and bobs of Open Source software and maintains his raelity bytes Weblog.

Paperback: 325 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 1, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596004478
ISBN-13: 978-0596004477
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 38 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,095,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11175 in Computer Science (Books)
- #349 in Network Storage & Retrieval Administration
- #1097 in Computer Hacking

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Tim Edwards

Nice toolkit

April 6, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

We got a used copy of Google Hacks, and my wife studied the searcher's tips for a couple weeks before I got to study the webmaster's guide. Like the Jack Sprats of the nursery rhyme, we licked that platter clean. It's dated now, but that only means there is more on Google than got into the book, I have not found a script or search parameter that was discontinued.

This is not for light reading, it is intended for people who want to get the most out of the web, and are not content with Wizards and auto-pilot.

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M. Grapenthien

Excellent for most, but not much there for techs/programmers

April 30, 2003

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I was disappointed in this book. I bought it mainly because of the positive reviews on amazon(.com), but I spent some time with it and I didn't really find much that was useful that I didn't already know. However, I had already spent a lot of time exploring Google in the past, and spent the last five years administering systems, including web servers.
"Hacks" in the title is a misnomer. There's a section of cool hacks outside the Google API, but most of the book is simply a manual to Google. I don't see using built in features as "hacking" (which is a positive term, "cracking" is the term for what pop culture calls hacking).
The book is definitely readable from beginning to end, but would be most useful as a reference for a specific task than a general guide.
All the information in the book is correct, and it's fairly entertaining reading for a book about a search engine. There is a ton of useful information for most average computer users - things that can help you find what you're looking for, faster, easier, less hassle, more fun. Google is indeed much more than "just" a search engine. This would be excellent for people who use the web a lot for anything, but especially researchers.
My problem is that it seems to be marketed toward the computer professional, someone with at least a little programming experience. Smart move, how many others are going to buy a book about a search engine? The reviews I read raved at how useful it was to them, as programmers. However, I found most of the book to be either stuff I already knew, stuff that you could easily find in online help, or things that aren't very useful.
I still did get a few things out of it. I didn't know about the phone book lookups, newsgroup archives, and there is some good stuff for webmasters at the end. A lot of the scripts and script ideas are somewhat interesting, but do not seem generally useful.
Of course, I didn't know all the syntax and a bunch of other details, but this stuff is available easily by clicking the help button. The first few chapters are generally and widely useful. The games are interesting, I guess. For a lot of the stuff in the middle and the end, some programming experience is very useful. People who have this experience don't need the beginning. But the people who need the beginning probably can't do much with the rest, though it is still readable and interesting.
Overall, if you are interested enough to be reading reviews about it, I would probably recommend buying it, but not for tech-types who already know Google pretty well. Still, I can't really imagine someone for whom large parts of this book would be either not useful or not relevant. For occasional search engine users it would be extremely helpful, but how many from this group are going to sit down with a book about a search engine?
O'Reilly, the publisher, produces excellent books on all kinds of tech topics, and this is the first I've been disappointed with. Several of their books are considered the definitive resource on their topics, and served as my guides to learning Unix and different programming languages. I would not have bought this book if it wasn't from them.

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Mark Zeller

Expert only?

July 2, 2003

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book isn't as fun and easy as it sounds. I was able to play with a few "hacks", but on the whole, I didn't find this book too user-friendly or easy to comprehend.

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Wesley

Google Geeks Beware

April 12, 2003

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Dont make the same mistake I did: on the advice of numerous sites around the net (/. for one), this book is supposed to deliver loads of new material to both novice and veteran googlers. To the former, definately, as for the latter, there is nothing in this book you have not picked up already.

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Amazon Customer

Not just for programmers

April 19, 2003

Format: Paperback

This book isn't at all what I expected - and this was a very welcome surprise! From the colophon for the first time not being a member of the animal kingdom (a pair of locking pliers dresses the book's cover) to the content within, this is another achievement for the fine folks at O'Reilly.
I first got a copy of the book thinking it was an end-to-end collection of code snippets on using the Google API to write custom apps to access Google's massive data store, but it's so much more than that. The book is wholly a collection of 100 quick-reading tips and tricks on using Google, but not exclusively from a coder's point of view. For that reason, it's very flexible to a wide audience. It's subdivided into distinct sections that focus on using the various services and features offered by Google, such as time-saving query syntax, to customized programming with the Google API, to off-the-wall tricks.
The book also gives great examples of performing searches that have little-to-no documentation from Google, such as doing lookups for stock symbols or phone numbers. The authors also do a great job of highlighting several utilities and apps built within and outside of the scope of the Google Terms of Service agreement to access its data. The games are quirky, but cool. You're unquestionably going to find something in the title's pages you'll find neat and want to replicate/morph for your own use.
It may tend to disappoint codeheads who buy it just for syntax and rippable code samples for using the Google API, but it does more than make up for it in being a reference for getting the most out of what's undoubtedly the world's most popular search engine.
The only criticism I have is that the book was very top-heavy in examples written in Perl, so it's more applicable to that crowd, especially given that the book's back cover advertised examples in .NET, Java, Python, and PHP. (There was ONE example for each of the aforementioned languages and platforms in the chapter on programming against the Google API). However, my fellow .NET developers can surely use the Perl .NET or if you're up for a good challenge, cross-translate the Perl syntax into the equivalent of your favorite .NET language.
But outside of that, the book's great. It's quick, fun, organized and won't force you to give up a couple nights to get through it. And it not being solely a programmer's book, it's also applicable for others in your school, office and household. I've let several people read it - namely a teacher, a couple of students, and some Web surfers - and they all enjoyed it thoroughly. You read what you need to read, and get on with your life.
And at US$...it's a steal.

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5 star		37%
4 star		31%
3 star		20%
2 star		13%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools 1st Edition

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