Print Book $24.99
Print Book £17.50
By Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain
Third Edition
August 2006
Pages: 543
Series: Hacks
ISBN 10: 0-596-52706-3 |
ISBN 13: 9780596527068
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
Now that new features and services such as Google Maps, Google Talk, and Google Desktop have been added to the expanding Google universe, we've made the third edition of this bestseller into an infinitely more useful book for this powerful search engine. You'll not only find dozens of hacks for new Google services, but plenty of updated tips, tricks and scripts for hacking the old ones.
Full Description
Everyone knows that Google lets you search billions of web pages. But few people realize that Google also gives you hundreds of cool ways to organize and play with information.
Since we released the last edition of this bestselling book, Google has added many new features and services to its expanding universe: Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Blog Search, Video Search, Music Search, Google Base, Google Reader, and Google Desktop among them. We've found ways to get these new services to do even more.
The expanded third edition of Google Hacks is a brand-new and infinitely more useful book for this powerful search engine. You'll not only find dozens of hacks for the new Google services, but plenty of updated tips, tricks and scripts for hacking the old ones. Now you can make a Google Earth movie, visualize your web site traffic with Google Analytics, post pictures to your blog with Picasa, or access Gmail in your favorite email client. Industrial strength and real-world tested, this new collection enables you to mine a ton of information within Google's reach. And have a lot of fun while doing it:
- Search Google over IM with a Google Talk bot
- Build a customized Google Map and add it to your own web site
- Cover your searching tracks and take back your browsing privacy
- Turn any Google query into an RSS feed that you can monitor in Google Reader or the newsreader of your choice
- Keep tabs on blogs in new, useful ways
- Turn Gmail into an external hard drive for Windows, Mac, or Linux
- Beef up your web pages with search, ads, news feeds, and more
- Program Google with the Google API and language of your choice
For those of you concerned about Google as an emerging Big Brother, this new edition also offers advice and concrete tips for protecting your privacy. Get into the world of Google and bend it to your will!
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Book details
Third Edition: August 2006
Series:
Hacks
ISBN: 0-596-52706-3
Pages: 543
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 2 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
Diappointed in O'Reilly, July 28 2007
I generally love O'Reilly books because the authors usually have a close relationship with the subject and can therefore write about the things that will be true when the book comes out. However, this book came out in August '06 but the SOAP API stopped working in December '06. By the time I bought it at the Maker Faire in San Mateo in May '07, none of the web pages or sample code in the first chapter worked.
I suggest forgetting about this book. Google moves too fast, you might as well get the information directly from them instead of reading about APIs and websites that don't work. I sure wish I had.
GOOGLE HACKS, March 06 2007
I'm not a novice surfer but even I rarely scratch the surface of the long list of features
Google offers. This book serves, at the vry least,
to remind me of them. It's a reference book, well indexed to find the feature that will
best serve the purpose at hand. For example, did you know that Google serves as a powerful phonebook? Sadly, it's only for the US so far, but entering in the Google search bar [phonebook:smith ca] without the brackets will list all
the Smiths in California. Entering [phonebook:john smith ca] will narrow the focus. And it returns phone number, street address and zip code for each. Similar keywords exist to restrict information searches to specific websites
[site:] website titles [intitle:], website text [intext:] and to find an expired page [cache:] to name just a handful. We have Gmail accounts and they come with a generous 2GB of mailbox space (each!) but I didn't realize that there is a simple installation that will turn that space
into appearing as an additonal 2GB drive on your machine.
Handy enough if an extra 2GB will buy you some
time before having to get new hardware, but if you want to share your Gmail log-in with family somewhere, you can now have a shared drive for those family photos. An entire chapter deals with tips and tricks for Gmail.
Google maps [http://maps.google.com or http://
maps.google.ca or http://maps.google.co.uk -- you get the idea] offers a quick serving of a map of any location you ask for. Type in an address, or a business name and city, or simply "hotels in Toronto" and up comes a map, zoomable and scrollable, marked with whatever you asked for. A word of caution is warranted here. Many of the features appear to be VERY browser-dependent
(and likely OS-dependent as well). I got VERY
different results using IE5 and IE6 on two different machines.
The newer browser gave the results described
in the book while the older one did not. For example, refocusing the map centre by dragging, or zooming in by clicking a spot, worked in one but not the other. Ever think of Google as a dictionary? Try it! Type in [define:oxymoron] or even [define:phat] since it will offer
up definitions of slang as well as accepted English. Note especially that the syntax for all these keywords requires (a) that the keyword be all lower case and (b)no space following the colon. This book ranges from quick and easy tips to cut through the millions of search hits and more tightly focus your results to programming hacks that you can add to your websites to customize and harness Google's amazing
power. In fact, a full chapter -- 50 pages of the 500 -- are for the programmer and require registration with Google after which you can download a Deveoper's Kit.
Although I may at some point dabble with programming again, for now I'm satisfied to comb through the 47 pages of the Webmastering chapter which shows you how to tweak your own websites to get the most out of Google. I added a search button to mine so that visitors can use
the Google engine to search within the sites. The book also offers links to webmaster tools such as registering your site with Google and submitting a site map to help Google help you and your visitors.
Yes, this is a book that will remain within reach of my keyboard. If you use Google more than rarely, you'll use this book.
Media reviews
"Who knew that Google needed a manual? Google's simple interface covers an immensely sophisticated tool that does all kinds of tricks, many of which have little to do with searching and much to do with harnessing the collective power of the web. As a non-programmer I probably won't use many of those hacks. But simply by enhancing my ability to google, this guide -- now in a meaty third edition -- is worth the price. It's the Missing Manual to Google."
-- Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools
"From building a customized Google map for your web site to handling RSS feeds, news listings, blogs, and even using Gmail as an external hard drive, Google Hacks comes packed with usage tips not to be found elsewhere."
-- The Midwest Book Review
"If you want to create and distribute information using Google tools or find new, innovative ways of using tools that we make available to you, this book will help you. The folks at O'Reilly have put together an eminently usable tome, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. "
-- Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google
"If you want to take your internet experience to the next level, this book will really help."
-- Victoria Maciulski, Conejo Ventura Macintosh Users Group (CVMUG)
"Do you want to make your Google searching experience more fruitful? If you do, then this book is for you! Authors Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch and Tara Calishain, have done an outstanding job of writing a third edition of a book that goes beyond the instruction page to the idea of hacks...This most excellent book is not an exhaustive manual on how every command in the Google syntax works. But, rather, this book shows you some tricks for making the best use of a search."
-- John Vacca, Amazon.com
"Who knew that Google needed a manual? Google's simple interface covers an immensely sophisticated tool that does all kinds of tricks, many of which have little to do with searching and much to do with harnessing the collective power of the web. As a non-programmer I probably won't use many of those hacks. But simply by enhancing my ability to google, this guide -- now in a meaty third edition -- is worth the price. It's the Missing Manual to Google."
-- Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools
"I think this is the one book everyone working the Web should have - not that I want to ignore the politics of the Google monopoly. Google is fast, highly configurable, and as everyone knows, offers a lot of applications; as a portal to the 'World's Information' it's suspect, but as a tool, it's more than useful. The book covers things that I've always wanted to know - for example, how to download your GMail directories (it's a python program), how to scrape sites for information, how to program Google (I've used this section from past editions for creative textwork), things to do with Google maps, how to scrape and work with Google groups, and so forth. (Does anyone work with newsgroups anymore?) Once you get the hang of it, Google is similar to regular expressions; you can filter and manipulate quickly with all sorts of filtering. I think this book is the best guide I've seen; although it's in the Hacks series, it gives fundamental information. Some of the hacks require programming, by the way, but the programming is relatively simple."
-- Alan Sondheim, Cybermind
"The latest tips and techniques to master, manipulate, and manage the wealth of services and information that is available through Google. Readers learn how to become power searchers, exploring all of Google's applications and services. Among the things that the authors explain (that you probably didn't know) are: how to convert a Google query into an RSS feed that can be monitored in any newsreader; how to use Gmail as an external hard drive for Linus, Mac, or Windows; how to build a customized Google Map and add it to your Web site; and more."
-- Michael Kleper, The Kleper Report on Digital Publishing
"There are 100 tips, tricks, and hacks contained within these pages, and all of them are related to making the most of what Google has to offer. Since Google changes seemingly by the hour, the likelihood is very good that there are new features and toys that you didn't know existed...Even if you have the 1st or 2nd edition, don't wonder if you should go out and get #3. Yes, you should... Lots of new stuff to play with here."
-- Thomas Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings
