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Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition
Graeme Williams writes "In thinking about Google:
The Missing Manual, Second Edition it occurred to me that the Google search
box is like the Tardis -- there's a lot more inside that little box
than you expect. Writing a manual for Google must have felt a little bit like
writing a Manual of Everything, and I'm not sure I'm qualified to review Everything. However, I did read the book, and found a lot I
didn't know about Google and using it. You will too." Read the rest of Graeme's review.
Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition
author
Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer, Matthew MacDonald
pages
xv + 446
publisher
O'Reilly Media
rating
9
reviewer
Graeme Williams
ISBN
0-596-10019-1
summary
An excellent overview, although understandably going out of date in real time
Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition adds two new authors, 151 pages and two chapters, Google Analytics and Gmail, to the first edition. One comment about the authors: Rael Dornfest, one of the two authors of the first edition, is included as an author in the online O'Reilly catalog entry but not in the actual paper book.
The first part of the book presents two related topics: searching and the search box. Because it's cumbersome to distinguish between searching for "blah blah blah" and "blah blah blah" (no quotes), I'll use slashes to delimit the text that goes into the search box: /"blah blah blah"/ versus /blah blah blah/.
The authors mention that a long time ago other search engines had pages that were slow to load, then Google introduced a fast loading search page with almost nothing on it, and partly because of that, it became popular. They single out Yahoo! as having a slow and bloated front page. But now Google has an alternative front page with more content, and Yahoo! has an alternative search page with less content. The comparison wouldn't be fair even if this was a book comparing Google and Yahoo!, and it isn't.
The book covers searching clearly and thoroughly, I'd be flabbergasted if you didn't discover something you didn't know. The book also presents nine other things you can type into the search box, such as /define:syzygy/, or /phonebook:white house washington dc/. You can find a list on the Google Web Search Features page. I think it's great that the authors included this section, although some of the "features" seem more robust than others.
The book explained one thing about searching I should have realized: the order of search terms matters. /red frog/ will give you slightly different results than /frog red/. For that example, the difference is small, but it's greater the more complicated the search. The authors would like more people to use the Search within Results feature: "Google has a great feature for helping you narrow down your results to find the really relevant pages, although almost nobody uses it". Almost nobody uses it because it's not all that useful. All it does is add the new term(s) to the end of your previous search. But to the extent that the order of search terms matters, maybe you want the new search term added to the beginning of the search. Or if you're searching for a phrase, perhaps the additional words should be part of the phrase, inside the quotes.
Here's one hack that's missing from the manual. Instead of enclosing a phrase in quotes, /"to be or not to be"/, you can replace the spaces with periods, /to.be.or.not.to.be/. This example turns out to fail, because Google thinks you're looking for a web site in Belgium, but it works most of the time. As a typing-impaired person I like it because it saves having to find the shift key.
The second part of Google: The Missing Manual is the largest part of the book, and the hardest to categorize. It's almost 200 pages long, and covers all the user features other than GMail and the basic search box. Depending on how you count them, there are over a dozen different services described, including desktop, image, news, and print search, shopping with Froogle, Google Local (which has absorbed maps), Groups, Answers, and the wireless and SMS interfaces. Browser features include searching from the sidebar, address bar, toolbar, Googlebar, buttons and bookmarklets.
When the book was written, the Google Deskbar was a search tool for the web with some useful specialized searches such as UPS and USPS, as well as the data indexed by desktop search. It had a miniviewer which I quite liked for looking at search results without opening a full browser window. The miniviewer has since disappeared, and the deskbar has morphed into the Google Desktop, which can appear either as a deskbar or a sidebar, and in the latter incarnation can be configured with multiple pop-out panes. There are other, less significant changes as well. If you have a Google account, your choices for personalized news are stored in your account, and news alerts is out of beta, and they're stored in your account as well. These changes affect the screenshots in the book more than the explanatory text.
Overall, the material in part two is very useful, even as it goes out of date. Just like other parts of the book, I'm sure you'll learn things you never knew, or have forgotten. During an excellent introduction to Froogle, Google's search-powered shopping service, the book reminded me of Google Catalogs, the service for searching catalogs.
The third part of the book is for webmasters, starting with a good introduction to the legitimate ways to structure your site to improve its ranking, as well as using a robots.txt file to hide some or all of your site from Google's spiders. Google: The Missing Manual also explains the two complementary programs for Google ads: Adsense is the service where Google provides ads for your site; Adwords is the service where you can advertise your site on Google, or on sites that have subscribed to Adsense. Finally, Analytics is a service for tracking visitors to your site. It integrates with Adsense but doesn't require it. At the moment, it's available only by invitation. Obviously, these services are of less general interest than the other parts of the book – you can't put Adwords on your MySpace or MSDN Spaces page.
The fourth part of Google: The Missing Manual describes Gmail. As with other parts of Google, there are new features that just don't appear in the book, like mailing lists or the built-in chat, as well as features that have moved around, like the new button for "Delete". Also, you used to need an invitation to sign up for GMail, but now you can sign up if you have a cell phone that can receive a text message from Google with a code in it.
The book mentions the fact that GMail includes a "standard HTML" mode for older browsers, but implies that this mode has limited functionality. I suspect that Google has improved the interface since the book was written, since I couldn't find any significant difference between the two modes, although the book does mention one difference: the lack of a spell checker in standard HTML.
The book confuses new messages, which Google doesn't keep track of, and unread messages, which are counted and displayed in bold.
The authors acknowledge (p 8) that between the time the book was written and the time it was published, Google will have introduced new services, such as Google Finance or Google Pages, as well as changes in existing services. Since it's not realistic to expect the book to describe the features Google put in yesterday, it might have made sense for the authors to mention when the contents of the book were frozen. It's sort of unfair, but a lot of this book will be ancient history in another year.
Despite the fact that some of the material in the book is out-of-date, I think everyone will find this book useful. When we get into a rut using programs and services in the same old way every time, we need a hard push to explore new features, and Google: The Missing Manual is just the thing to help learn more about Google. If you don't use Google, you should read it to find out all the neat features you're missing out on. If you DO use Google, you should read it to find out all the neat features you're not taking advantage of."
You can purchase Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition adds two new authors, 151 pages and two chapters, Google Analytics and Gmail, to the first edition. One comment about the authors: Rael Dornfest, one of the two authors of the first edition, is included as an author in the online O'Reilly catalog entry but not in the actual paper book.
The first part of the book presents two related topics: searching and the search box. Because it's cumbersome to distinguish between searching for "blah blah blah" and "blah blah blah" (no quotes), I'll use slashes to delimit the text that goes into the search box: /"blah blah blah"/ versus /blah blah blah/.
The authors mention that a long time ago other search engines had pages that were slow to load, then Google introduced a fast loading search page with almost nothing on it, and partly because of that, it became popular. They single out Yahoo! as having a slow and bloated front page. But now Google has an alternative front page with more content, and Yahoo! has an alternative search page with less content. The comparison wouldn't be fair even if this was a book comparing Google and Yahoo!, and it isn't.
The book covers searching clearly and thoroughly, I'd be flabbergasted if you didn't discover something you didn't know. The book also presents nine other things you can type into the search box, such as /define:syzygy/, or /phonebook:white house washington dc/. You can find a list on the Google Web Search Features page. I think it's great that the authors included this section, although some of the "features" seem more robust than others.
The book explained one thing about searching I should have realized: the order of search terms matters. /red frog/ will give you slightly different results than /frog red/. For that example, the difference is small, but it's greater the more complicated the search. The authors would like more people to use the Search within Results feature: "Google has a great feature for helping you narrow down your results to find the really relevant pages, although almost nobody uses it". Almost nobody uses it because it's not all that useful. All it does is add the new term(s) to the end of your previous search. But to the extent that the order of search terms matters, maybe you want the new search term added to the beginning of the search. Or if you're searching for a phrase, perhaps the additional words should be part of the phrase, inside the quotes.
Here's one hack that's missing from the manual. Instead of enclosing a phrase in quotes, /"to be or not to be"/, you can replace the spaces with periods, /to.be.or.not.to.be/. This example turns out to fail, because Google thinks you're looking for a web site in Belgium, but it works most of the time. As a typing-impaired person I like it because it saves having to find the shift key.
The second part of Google: The Missing Manual is the largest part of the book, and the hardest to categorize. It's almost 200 pages long, and covers all the user features other than GMail and the basic search box. Depending on how you count them, there are over a dozen different services described, including desktop, image, news, and print search, shopping with Froogle, Google Local (which has absorbed maps), Groups, Answers, and the wireless and SMS interfaces. Browser features include searching from the sidebar, address bar, toolbar, Googlebar, buttons and bookmarklets.
When the book was written, the Google Deskbar was a search tool for the web with some useful specialized searches such as UPS and USPS, as well as the data indexed by desktop search. It had a miniviewer which I quite liked for looking at search results without opening a full browser window. The miniviewer has since disappeared, and the deskbar has morphed into the Google Desktop, which can appear either as a deskbar or a sidebar, and in the latter incarnation can be configured with multiple pop-out panes. There are other, less significant changes as well. If you have a Google account, your choices for personalized news are stored in your account, and news alerts is out of beta, and they're stored in your account as well. These changes affect the screenshots in the book more than the explanatory text.
Overall, the material in part two is very useful, even as it goes out of date. Just like other parts of the book, I'm sure you'll learn things you never knew, or have forgotten. During an excellent introduction to Froogle, Google's search-powered shopping service, the book reminded me of Google Catalogs, the service for searching catalogs.
The third part of the book is for webmasters, starting with a good introduction to the legitimate ways to structure your site to improve its ranking, as well as using a robots.txt file to hide some or all of your site from Google's spiders. Google: The Missing Manual also explains the two complementary programs for Google ads: Adsense is the service where Google provides ads for your site; Adwords is the service where you can advertise your site on Google, or on sites that have subscribed to Adsense. Finally, Analytics is a service for tracking visitors to your site. It integrates with Adsense but doesn't require it. At the moment, it's available only by invitation. Obviously, these services are of less general interest than the other parts of the book – you can't put Adwords on your MySpace or MSDN Spaces page.
The fourth part of Google: The Missing Manual describes Gmail. As with other parts of Google, there are new features that just don't appear in the book, like mailing lists or the built-in chat, as well as features that have moved around, like the new button for "Delete". Also, you used to need an invitation to sign up for GMail, but now you can sign up if you have a cell phone that can receive a text message from Google with a code in it.
The book mentions the fact that GMail includes a "standard HTML" mode for older browsers, but implies that this mode has limited functionality. I suspect that Google has improved the interface since the book was written, since I couldn't find any significant difference between the two modes, although the book does mention one difference: the lack of a spell checker in standard HTML.
The book confuses new messages, which Google doesn't keep track of, and unread messages, which are counted and displayed in bold.
The authors acknowledge (p 8) that between the time the book was written and the time it was published, Google will have introduced new services, such as Google Finance or Google Pages, as well as changes in existing services. Since it's not realistic to expect the book to describe the features Google put in yesterday, it might have made sense for the authors to mention when the contents of the book were frozen. It's sort of unfair, but a lot of this book will be ancient history in another year.
Despite the fact that some of the material in the book is out-of-date, I think everyone will find this book useful. When we get into a rut using programs and services in the same old way every time, we need a hard push to explore new features, and Google: The Missing Manual is just the thing to help learn more about Google. If you don't use Google, you should read it to find out all the neat features you're missing out on. If you DO use Google, you should read it to find out all the neat features you're not taking advantage of."
You can purchase Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I wonder if Google will scan this in their "Book Search Project" http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/15/01 9251
Funnypics
Did anyone notice that Google Notebook has gone live?
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
The requested URL (books/06/05/17/1347228.shtml) was not found.
If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.
Way to get literal on me Slashdot.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
The review says the book includes Gmail. Last time I checked (admittedly a few months back) Gmail was still in beta and invite-only. Has this changed?
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
...is right here. You'd think that would have turned up in a Google search, sheesh.
For the dwindling class of people who don't get the ref, the TARDIS is Doctorr Who's time machine, which is bigger inside than it appears from outside. Graeme Williams gets several hundred bonus nerd points.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Here's one hack that's missing from the manual. Instead of enclosing a phrase in quotes, /"to be or not to be"/, you can replace the spaces with periods, /to.be.or.not.to.be/.
And, if you replace the periods with dashes, behold... IT WORKS TOO!
Who needs a book on Google eh? just Google it, it's cheaper...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Maybe these are just new to me, but two features I've found and use are how Google interprets searches and provides links to their own database, or directly to the deep-linked page I'm looking for.
For example, search for "U2 Joshua Tree Discography" and the top hit is for Google's own music CD database, giving me exactly what I wanted in a clean, efficient, fast-loading manner. (I know, this keeps me on their site, seeing their ads longer, but I'm still happy.)
The second feature is package tracking. Just type in the package number (for example: "736805130363") into the box and search. There is only one link - directly to the FedEx tracking page for the package. Given that I have a Google search box in my browser, this saves typing "fedex.com", waiting for it to load, then finding their own tracker search box.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
or how they try to use it while not doing evil...
42
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here's one hack that's missing from the manual. Instead of enclosing a phrase in quotes, /"to be or not to be"/, you can replace the spaces with periods, /to.be.or.not.to.be/. This example turns out to fail, because Google thinks you're looking for a web site in Belgium, but it works most of the time. As a typing-impaired person I like it because it saves having to find the shift key.
Blank stare...
I don't really understand why one should read such a book and why the reviewer rates it so high. The features of google are clearly described on their website and there are hundreds of books about the usage of search engines on the internet.
Useless?
With a shelf life somewhere between milk and bread, this book would have to be pretty darn cheap for me to buy it.
My favorite google search is "sqrt(-1)"
Won't that cause a tear in the space-time continuum?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So, with google, how do I search for the difference between the following LaTeX commands:
/LaTeX \circle \circle*/ is the same as /latex circle/, which is completly different.
\circle
\circle*
Google's dropping of all punctuation is quite annoying, and makes some queries impossible, as
One really cool way to explore the advanced google features is to play The Gwigle game. If you could get through the entire thing in less than a few hours, I'd be really impressed. The last problem is particularly cute.
Save yourself $9.25 by buying the book here: Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
'I've heard there's a way to uniquely identify yourself when making a comment on Slashdot...'
Yeah... Just type your posts with correct punctuation, grammar and spelling. Your posts light up like a christmas tree..
In other words: fewer people would be talking about Doctor Who if it wasn't currently on TV. Wow. Insight into the human condition there.
At any rate, even if there were not new episodes being aired, TARDIS analogies would certainly not be dead. Perhaps in the US the show was all but forgotten until the appearance of the Ninth, but in the UK its cultural impact was far, far greater. Anything which is deceptively small, and which is larger inside than you might have originally expected, can and will be compared to the TARDIS, and not just by geeks but by anybody.
The fact that the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than on the outside was probably the most remembered thing about that show. Hotly followed by 'the special effects were awful', 'hiding behind the sofa', 'scarf', and 'you're safe if you run up the stairs'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
if you type in an aircraft's tail number, google shows an airplane icon at the top and shows a link to the faa's aircraft registry
w indow=1&q=n244cg
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&new