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Google Hacks
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.
...misuses of the Google API could lead to them not allowing open access to it anymore, which would deny access to useful tools to proper users.
You mean to tell me someone wrote a book that can give better options than "+" and "-"?
Nice... see you at bn.com!
100% Insightful
Looks like an interesting book, I will look out for it. The 'power' of google is not particularly touched on in everyday use at all.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Doesn't this book defeat the very purpose of google ?
I don't know about all you guys, but google preety much comes up with what i want in the first of second search page.
Most of the time i don't even have to use +, - , "". I think thats the good thing about google. Its ability to come up with the most relevant sites.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
This is NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT "+3 Informative" by ANY FUCKING STANDARDS IMAGINABLE!
I mean, seriously! In what way does this post provide informational content? It informs us that "dubbayu d 40" thinks "they'll make $$$" and THAT'S IT! IT'S JUST NOT VERY INFORMATIVE!
I think I'm going to bry.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Free? You'll have to tell us where you're getting "free" Windows licenses - because that's the ONLY platform that supports VBScript. The examples were most likely written in Perl, which is a far better language than VB or VBScript due to its portability and low overhead. Why write a book that's only useful to Windows users when you can significantly increase your market by using a free, portable language?
Besides, to please the Slashdot crowd, shouldn't all of the examples be Written in C??
No, to please the Slashdot crowd, they should be written in any language that Microsoft doesn't control, preferably one that's difficult to run on Windows - like shell. :)
I recall a time when O'Reilly published excellent books on interesting technical subjects. They weren't neccesarily definitive works but they were well researched, well written, often a good deal lighter and smaller and easier to cart around in your backpack than hardcover bound gazillion page epics and they had those neat little pictures, which I suppose they still have, of bunnies and tigers and camels and such.
Now there are about 75 billion titles. Underwater Basket Weaving in XML. Genital Hygene with .NET. See Spot Run and write a Perl script. The Love That Dare Not Speak It's Name While Hacking Some Awesome DHTML Tricks With Javascript And Then Going To The Toilet, though not in a rude way, how lucky you English are to find the toilet such a source of amusement, for us it is strictly functional.
If O'Reilly was a pet it would be like a stinky old dog that isn't cute anymore and it's blind in one eye and has fleas and pees when it's excited.
Now wash your hands.
No, Google does support full-word wildcards, in which an isolated '*' represents a full word. Multiple wildcards (e.g., "How to * a *") can be used in a phrase. Google does not support stemming, in which a wildcard character (such as '*') represents a portion of a word, e.g., "How to feed a cat*" in hopes of matching 'cat', 'catfish', 'cathous- er, you get the idea.
"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 my freaking God! Cry me a river! If you are not a good enough programmer to port code from ASP/VB then you don't know what a "more portable" language is.