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BookReview: "Google Hacks"
by Alan German
Sub-titled
“Tips and Tools for Smarter Searching”, this
book just had to be for me. I have never figured out how
to do a Google search without producing at least 100,000
hits, few of which pertained to the issue in question.
So, did authors Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest come to
my rescue? Let’s find out…
The review copy, kindly provided to OPCUG by the
publisher, O’Reilly Media, Inc., is the 2nd Edition
of the work. The book is more-or-less sanctioned by
Google since members of that company provide the
forewords for both editions. As the first foreword
indicates, one has to wonder just how much hacking can be
done on Google to warrant an entire book. The answer is
clear – plenty. The book contains 100 hacks (i.e.
tips, tools, and techniques) that require well over 400
pages of explanation.
As you might imagine, just about everything you wanted to
know about using Google is between the covers – from
case (in)sensitivity, to the 850 million messages in
Google Groups, to the technique of screen scraping. One
caution though – to use most of the hacks in the
book requires the knowledge to do scripting - using
packages like Perl, Java and PHP. In fact, the
book’s contents are broken down in several distinct
sections. The first chapter is probably the most useful
for many users since the tips describe Google’s
basic features, and how to make best use of the search
engine’s built-in, advanced capabilities. The
remaining chapters make heavy use of scripts, together
with information on specialized items such as add-ons,
Google’s AdWords, page ranking, and the Web API.
Since I don’t really do any scripting, and
don’t think I have a use for AdWords, this article
will mainly focus on the first section of the book, with
just brief mentions of some of the more esoteric hacks
that appear in later chapters.
Probably everyone knows how to search for a specific
phrase by enclosing the text in quotation marks. But, do
you need to enter capital letters for proper names? Try
entering “ottawa pc users’ group” in
Google’s search box and the answer is clear. Just
like the book says - text searches are case insensitive
– and can be very direct!
Probably everyone also knows that the use of
“and” as a search word is redundant for most
search engines, Google included. But, did you also know
that if you want to use a Boolean “or”, this
has to be entered in upper case? Or, that you can combine
Boolean search terms using brackets? For example, "President's
Report" AND (Taylor OR Schopf) site:opcug.ca
returns information on precisely what you might expect.
(As noted initially, AND in this search phrase is
redundant; it is included here for clarity.) A remarkable
finding, to me at any rate, was this item of special
syntax: “site:”, that allows you to restrict
your search to a specific web site. You may have heard
that OPCUG ran a workshop on digital imaging this past
fall. You could have looked on the club’s home page,
where you would have found the Workshop button
prominently displayed but, just to illustrate the power
of this tip, try typing the following into Google’s
search box - "digital imaging workshop"
site:opcug.ca. Now, that’s a focused search
result!
Google has lots of other similar tricks up its electronic
sleeve. For example, there’s the use of * as a wild
card that, among other uses, will allow you to circumvent
the search engine’s ten word search limit (did you
know Google had such a limit?) You can also specify that
a search is to include a range of numbers, such as
looking for a digital camera having between 3 and 5
megapixels, by using the syntax: “digital
camera” 3..5 megapixels. Regrettably, a search for
"Windows XP" ..$10, i.e. hopefully finding
someone selling XP for less than $10, is not so
successful.
Try typing "digital
imaging
workshop” site:opcug.ca
into Google’s search box.
Now, that’s a focused
search result!
Of course,
if you don’t want to hack too much, you don’t
have to learn all this strange syntax stuff. Google has a
perfectly fine advanced search engine readily available
through the link “Advanced Search”, just to the
right of the main search box. Here, you can set a variety
of complex search terms by simply completing various
pre-defined fields, and selecting from a set of drop-down
menus.
Some of
Google’s other features noted in the book are
similarly available from links on the search
engine’s main screen. Have you tried searching for
image files on a given topic through the
“Image” link? "Chris Taylor"
+OPCUG produces lots of hits but not the
particular image I was thinking of (Chris will know the
one!). On a more serious note, the “more” link
on Google’s main page leads to a whole raft of
things discussed in the book, including Directory, a
subject index making use of the open directory project,
Scholar, where academics can search for technical papers,
and Google’s Labs where mere mortals can play with
some stuff that is still under development. One of the
latter items that has been mentioned on PUB II recently
is Google Maps, http://maps.google.ca/. This is a great tool for finding
locations, showing them as maps, satellite images, or a
hybrid of the two, with a street map overlaid on a
satellite image. And, the site gives really good driving
directions between your house and the target location -
or vice-versa - in case you’re really drunk on the
drive home! Of course, in the latter case, what you
really must do is to use “Local” and search for
“taxi” in “Ottawa, ON”.
If you are a user of G-mail, there’s a whole chapter
on that system for you to read. If you want to be a user
of G-mail there’s a whole raft of tips on how to
obtain a G-mail invite. In fact, if anyone with such an
invite and who, having read this article, is feeling
particularly grateful – probably because you
weren’t singled out like Chris! – you can
donate your invite to a very worthy cause. You will find
my E-mail address on the back page of the newsletter!
(See! I really did read the book. This is Hack #71 in
action!)
As promised, here are some of the really weird and
wonderful things that you can find in the book, most of
which require scripting. How about finding a recipe based
on the contents of your refrigerator, generating a random
page view, or running permutations on a number of
keywords automatically? Or, there’s my particular
favourite - the Red Green special - making a “search
engine belt buckle” by fastening a PDA onto a belt
with (duct) tape, and programming it to generate
scrolling Google results! For non-programmers, there are
also some ready-to-go systems available on the web. You
can try the “easy expert search” at http://www.soople.com/ as an alternative to
Google’s advanced search engine. And, if you find a
real use for Touchgraph (a visualization tool for results
from entering a URL), http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html, please let me know!
Finally, for those who, like me, have no idea what a
screen scraper is, it refers to the process of extracting
information automatically from a web page, as in
“spidering and scraping”. A program can wander
around the Internet, capturing information from various
web pages, for use outside of the context of the actual
pages, e.g. in an indexing application like Google.
Google Hacks is packed with useful tips although, as
noted, many require scripting and may be beyond the
capabilities (or interests) of most of us. The good news
is that the text is written with exceptional clarity, so
that the simpler tasks are easy to follow and put into
practice. While you can purchase the book on-line from
O’Reilly (see below), you can also preview the full
text at no charge for a trial period of 14 days by
signing up at:
http://safari.oreilly.com/?XmlId=0596008570
Bottom Line:
Google Hacks: Tips
and Tools for Smarter Searching
Second Edition, December 2004
by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN 0-596-00857-0
Available on-line ($36.95) at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlehks2/chapter/index.html
Preview the full text at no charge for a trial
period of 14 days by signing up at: http://safari.oreilly.com/?XmlId=0596008570
For an OPCUG discount on this and other O'Reilly
books, visit
http://opcug.ca/promos.htm
Google website: http://www.google.com/
Originally published: January, 2006
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