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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.
make sure you're using this Google...
You mean to tell me someone wrote a book that can give better options than "+" and "-"?
Nice... see you at bn.com!
100% Insightful
As if searching for pr0n wasn't easy enough...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
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.
[...] 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.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
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--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I'll check this one out. Is there an O'Reilly book that isn't useful or somewhat entertaining? Thier hacking series is top notch in my book.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
1. Take GOOGLE FOR DUMMIES. 2. Retitle it, adding a geek word (such as, oh, say, "hacks"). 3. Profit! No "?" step here.
Go to Google.com.
Type in the search terms, "French military victories".
Click "I'm feeling Lucky".
Enjoy.
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".
Google for:
"Index +of" $filename
The quotation marks are relavent.
I think a book like this has been due for awhile now. Google has more features than even they probably know about, but thankfully they don't try to cram them all into blocks all over the page. When you go to www.google.com you get a very accessible, very simple, yet still powerful site. Many people I know use nothing but the default google search, because it gets the job done. I can find out whatever I want about Linux from a basic google search. I can usually find it easier, however, with www.google.com/linux. I only head about it form word of mouth, I had never actually lookd for it. New services and tools are being added all the time, and I mean all the time :) check here to see some of the new and upcoming features. I think most of you would be suprised to find out all the ways google can make your life easier aside from just by being the best damned web search engine.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Can someone scan the book and put it in their Kazaa Shared Folder please? Thanks.
Some of them are quite fun to muck around with.
This story explains how that works and who's behind it.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Let's see here: Froogle! Ooh! The 5th result lists the book for $12.50. But then when I actually click on the link it's $15.50! Damn you, Froogle!
I'm sure if I had the book it would tell me how to hack Froogle into getting a lower price for the book. But then I'd already have the book...
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
That was very informative. Thank you.
Check out the download size of the Google API samples file...
Better read *all* the fine print in the EULA, son.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
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.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
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?
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If you tweak around with the URL, you can get Google News to display the navigation bar on top (it's better that way, IMHO).
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
Oh, another minor quibble, the allied web site O'Reilly Hacks Series has been slow
Which is why we are posting it on Slashdot, hoping that a bigger hammer will fix the problem
my sig
googleDorks
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
My Journal.
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. :)
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.
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.
"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.
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"