Google Hacks, 3rd Edition

Preface

Search engines for large collections of data preceded the World Wide Web by decades. There were those massive library catalogs, hand-typed with painstaking precision on index cards and eventually, to varying degrees, automated. There were the large data collections of professional information companies such as Dialog and LexisNexis. Then there are the extant private, expensive medical, real estate, and legal search services.

Those data collections were not always easy to search, but with a little finesse and a lot of patience, it was always possible to search them thoroughly. Information was grouped according to established ontologies, the data preformatted according to particular guidelines.

Then came the Web.

Information on the Web—as anyone who has ever looked at half a dozen web pages knows—is not all formatted the same way. Nor is it necessarily accurate. Nor up to date. Nor spellchecked. Nonetheless, search engines cropped up, trying to make sense of the rapidly increasing index of information online. Eventually, special syntaxes were added for searching common parts of the average web page (such as title or URL). Search engines evolved rapidly, trying to encompass all the nuances of the billions of documents online, and they continue to evolve today.

Google™ threw its hat into the ring in 1998. The second incarnation of a search engine service known as BackRub, the name Google was a play on the word googol: a one followed by a hundred zeros. From the beginning, Google ...