Google Hacks

honestpuck writes "It has been quite a while since I have come across a book I'd label 'essential.' The last for non-programming computer users was Robin Williams' The Mac Is Not A Typewriter which I bought for a number of new Macintosh users." Now, though, honestpuck has found another book which he says is required reading for modern computer users -- read on for his review of O'Reilly's Google Hacks. Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools author Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest pages 318 publisher O'Reilly rating Excellent reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0596004478 summary Excellent compendium of tips and tricks for everyone on using Google and its API

The book in brief Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest and published by O'Reilly will appeal to an even wider audience, I can imagine buying this for friends who haven't cottoned on to 'net searching at all and friends who complain "Google returns too many sites." People who are afraid to code shouldn't be put off by the "Hacks" in the title: O'Reilly have obviously taken a wider meaning of "hack" than just a neat piece of code. This book is a marvelous compendium of tips and tricks for Google, ranging from simple ways of getting the search results you want, through using Google's newer services such as phone books and image search, all the way to advanced ways of using scrapers and the Google API.

The book demonstrates 100 hacks, of which close to half are useful for everyone -- newbie, programmer and non-programmer alike. The first 35 hacks, in chapters one and two, will educate you about the intricacies of getting the best out of searching both Google's main web catalog and the newer 'Special Services and Collections.' This is the part of the book that should be essential reading for Google users -- in the two days I've had this book these have proved invaluable. The rest are for those who are either looking for extremely advanced search tips, increasing their web site's Google page rank, or programming an application to use the Google data -- all topics well covered in this volume.

What's Good In This Book

To start, it is well written, well laid out with a good contents section, good index, and some appropriate introductory material before getting down to the first hack. Each of the hacks are numbered and a single hack will often cross-reference other hacks that add information relevant to it. The hacks in each chapter nicely add on each other in both complexity and function.

The hacks themselves seem to cover every area of Google that you might want. They range from the downright frivolous (there is a chapter "Google Pranks and Games") to serious ways of improving your search results and excellent examples of good ways to use the Google API.

Most of the code fragments are in Perl, and among the hacks are ways of getting the job done without over extensive use of extra modules such as XML Parsers and SOAP::Lite (including a hack that uses regular expressions to parse the XML).

What's Bad In This Book

It's hard to find anything bad to say, apart from some frustration that a couple of the hacks that interested me used ASP or VB rather than a more portable language.

Oh, another minor quibble, the allied web site O'Reilly Hacks Series has been slow and has none of the code in the book or any of the URLs mentioned listed anywhere -- it seems more geared towards marketing the books than helping the readers.

(DISCLAIMER: I use Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blog software and have contributed a plugin for his software.)

You can purchase Google Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

what a good idea

[dubbayu_d_40]

I hope they make $$$, what a wonderful idea for a book.

BTW - google has a new pricewatch service, froogle.google.com. It doesn't sort by price, but you can lower the upper-bound price limit.

Google API.

[termos]

[...] excellent examples of good ways to use the Google API. [...]
I had never heard of a Google API, so I did a search on Google (hah), and found this. You can use it in your software as a nice little feature. Would it be nice to have a google search option in the help section of your next software project? I like that idea.

Searching for a specific file?

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Google for:

"Index +of" $filename

The quotation marks are relavent.

Re:Like what?

[SimplyCosmic]

There are some sample hacks on the O'Reilly webpage for the book, which is also available as part of the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for those that subscribe to the service.

Authors Website with some examples from the book

[jesus_watkins]

The author of the book has a website with some of the example that appear in the book.

Some of them are quite fun to muck around with.

Re:If you're a Google H4X0R...

[Theodore Logan]

Is that the way it's gonna be? You have to provide alternative Google logos to get some karma around here? Is that it? Huh? Ok, in that case, there's a whole archive of Google holiday logos over here. And one for fan logos over here.

Take that!

Re:Here's a fun little Google trick...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with google. This is just because someone made a funny (fake) pic of google returning that result, and enough people linked to it to make it the top result.

trick explained

[Joe the Lesser]

This story explains how that works and who's behind it.

Safari

[psocccer]

This is available on the Safari website for those that have subscriptions, which is nice because it's not a very long book. I was able to read most of it in a day, and I would have felt a little robbed had I bought it, but just checking it out gave me enough time to read what I wanted.

Can't be done i'm afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a license key to unlock the searches, which is limited to 1000 searches a day. This is fine for yourself, but if you distribute the software to 1000 people, they can only do one search each a day (or one person does 1000 searches and everyone else gets pissed off)

Oh and BTW, given the storys about the amount of personal data being cached by google every time you search, does anyone now what app/computer specific data the api's are sending back along with the query?

Wildcards

[linus_vp]

are specifically excluded in the Google documentation: To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. The effect in the above comment with 'how to * a cat' is because the * is ignored. From http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

Re:What I really want(but am too lazy to look for)

[antidigerati]

Why assume that it doesn't do that? Just because you don't know how?

Here is the advanced help page describing the search syntax you desire (plus others).

And because you have shown yourself to be lazy.. here is the syntax (linked even!) so you can try your above query on Google.

(baquaspa OR "baqua spa" OR "baquacil") (plastics OR warranty) bromine

On Google the AND is implied.. and you must capitalize your ORs.

Enjoy.

Re:Regexp

[alexo]

No regexp but you did hit on an interesting Google feature:

The "OR" operator works inside quoted expressions .

Therefore, the following queries work:
- "how to confuse OR annoy a cat"
- "how to confuse | annoy a cat"