Chapter 4. Extending Google
Google is of the Web, but this doesn’t mean it’s trapped in your browser. Google has become so much a part of the fabric of our everyday lives that it shows up just about everywhere: Google via instant messaging [Hack #52], from a chat room [Hack #50], on your mobile phone [Hack #51]; you can even tweak your browser [Hack #53] to take Google with you to every page you visit.
This chapter is a tour of some of the more interesting ways Google has leapt out of the pages of cyberspace onto your desktop, and into what hackers affectionately call meat space: everyday life, to you and me.
Keep Tabs on Your Searches with Google Alerts
Receive alerts in your email Inbox when something you’re after makes its way into the Google Web index, a Google News story, or a post at Google Groups.
There are two classes of search that one generally runs in Google. One is of the sort that you generally run just once: you’re trying to find information on some topic, a phone number, or that URL you visited yesterday but have since forgotten.
Then there’s the search you’d run every day if you could. You’re interested in a particular subject matter and want to know the moment Google finds and indexes something new on the topic.
Google Alerts notifies you of any new web pages or news stories that match your search criteria.
Tip
Google’s Web index does not consider a page “new” based on the date it was created. Instead, it considers a page new based on the date it was found ...