Google Hacks

Google’s Current Offerings

Google’s web search (http://www.google.com/) covers over 3 billion pages. In addition to HTML pages, Google’s web search also indexes PDF, Postscript, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Rich Text Format (RTF). Google’s web search also offers some syntaxes that find specific information, like stock quotes and phone numbers, but we’ll save that for later in the book.

[Hack #29]

The Google Directory (http://directory.google.com/) is a searchable subject index based on The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). As it indexes sites (not pages), it’s much smaller than the web search but better for general searches. Google has applied its popularity algorithm to the listings so that more popular sites rise to the top.

[Hack #30]

Usenet is a worldwide network of discussion groups. Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/) has archived Usenet’s discussions back 20 years in some places, providing an archive that offers over 700 million messages.

[Hack #31]

Google Images (http://images.google.com/) offers an archive of over 330 million images culled from sites all over the web. Images range from icon sized to wallpaper sized, with a variety of search engines for homing in on the closest one.

[Hack #32]

Google News (http://news.google.com/) is still in beta at the time of this writing. It checks over 4,000 sources for news and updates the database once an hour. Google News is different from most other search engines in that ...