Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tricks

by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest

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.

Genres: Computers, Nonfiction, Reference, Google, Technology, Programming, Internet

325 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Nassim Daoud · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a long time google searcher, it doesn't add much. Those kinds of books assumes you have tons of research results and you have trouble filtering them. Sometimes it is the case, but where you need help the most it isn't that kind of cases. You need help when you have only 6 results and all of them irrelevant or doesn't answer your particular question.

I've just skimmed through the book that it does a good job at introducing you at each part hello syntax how are you ? what do you do,... next hello google toolbar how are you doing and so on, for a guy acquainted with Google he wouldn't find anything new, I didn't investigate the API programming but I suspect the same observation apply to them

Buy it if you didn't heard about tweaks of searching Google.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot to be learned from this book. It's really exciting that the google API allows you to do some fun stuff with it. I ran across this book when trying to do a verbatim search in which the quotation marks were being strangely overridden. I was able to insist that each of the words be present in the results by adding a +plus mark in front of all subsequent words. Think that's how it works, anyway. Good book.

[Catherine Letendre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Très technique, il regroupe 100 trucs pour utiliser Google plus efficacement. Les trucs sont classés en 3 niveaux de difficulté, mais pour quelqu'un avec une connaissance moyenne d'internet, seul le premier niveau est compréhensible. Les deux autres jouent dans le code source.
Aussi, plusieurs des conseils ne sont plus valides puisque le livre date de 2006 et que Google a énormément changé depuis.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book sits next to my desk and has a lot to offer both the layperson and those with more experience with scripting and programming. Get the most recent edition you can find, and scour Google's help pages as well, because Google is constantly updating and changing their algorithms, so tricks in older books may not work as well as they used to.

[Jenne · Rating 3 out of 5]

It turns out that really the cool thing about Google is that you don't actually need to hack it.

So this was interesting but not that useful.

[sanjay]

Good Book you should try

[Aaron Alter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Google search, and google advanced search, don't hint that there are other "unpublished", methods to search the website. This book is full of useful information.

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the one hand, it's interesting.

On the other hand, there are four f*****g typoes in the first chapter, and one of them is in the first sentence. Proofreaders? ANYBODY?

[D-r-x-4-n-e-t · Rating 5 out of 5]

a

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geeks of teh internets, take notice! If you thought that you knew how to harness the power of Google, prepare for an earth-shattering read. This is the Google API, exposed!

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of information. Great resource. I learned a lot!

[Topilno]

Creating Web Pages for Dummies

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Out of date and really not very useful.

[Dwight Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Search engine tips for better retrieval. Many programming tips for Javascript, PHP, Perl and Python for gmail etc.