Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching

Whether you're a high school student looking for the latest info on your favorite rock group, or a seasoned attorney researching an old case, you're probably using Google. It seems like everyone is. And who can blame them? With access to more than three million documents in over 30 languages, Google is a researcher's dream. It's no wonder, then, that nearly 150 million Google searches are conducted each day. As a result, people are hungry to learn new ways to maximize its usefulness.Truth is, there are dozens upon dozens of techniques to learn--each designed to make your Google search more time-efficient, more productive, and more fun. And Google Hacks, Second Edition has the inside scoop on them all.An absolute must-have guide for anyone who searches the Internet--and these days that's just about everybody--Google Hacks, Second Edition takes its best-selling predecessor one step further. In plain language, Google Hacks, Second Edition is an updated collection of industrial-strength, real-world tested solutions to practical research problems.Best of all, each of its 100 hacks are easy to read and digest--no confusing terminology or extraneous information to hamper your understanding. And although they can be read in just a few short minutes, when put to use, they can easily save you hours of research time. Now that's bang for your buck!

If you're a programmer--or even just familiar with a HTML or a scripting language--Google opens up even further. A large part of Google Hacks concerns itself with the Google API (the collection of capabilities that Google exposes for use by software) and other programmers' resources. For example, the authors include a simple Perl application that queries the Google engine with terms specified by the user. They also document XooMLe, which delivers Google results in XML form. In brief, this is the best compendium of Google's lesser-known capabilities available anywhere, including the Google site itself. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to get the most from the Google search engine by using its Web-accessible features (including product searches, image searches, news searches, and newsgroup searches) and the large collection of desktop-resident toolbars available, as well as its advanced search syntax. Other sections have to do with programming with the Google API and simple "scrapes" of results pages, while further coverage addresses how to get your Web page to feature prominently in Google keyword searches.