February 2003
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
9h
English
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Running a Google Popularity Contest
Put two terms, spelling variations, animals, vegetables, or minerals head to head in a Google-based popularity contest.
Which is the most popular word? Which spelling is more commonly used? Who gets more mentions, Fred or Ethel Mertz? These and other equally critical questions are answered by Google Smackdown (http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp).
Why would you want to compare search counts? Sometimes finding out which terms appear more often can help you develop your queries better. Why use a particular word if it gets almost no results? Comparing misspellings can provide leads on hard-to-find terms or phrases. And sometimes it’s just fun to run a popularity contest.
If you’re just searching for keywords, Google Smackdown is very simple. Enter one word in each query box, a Google Web API developer’s key [Chapter 1] if you have one, and click the “throw down!” button. Smackdown will return the winner and approximate count of each search.
If you’re planning to use a special syntax,
you’ll have to be more careful. Unfortunately the
link: syntax doesn’t work.
Interestingly, phonebook: does; do more people
named Smith or Jones live in Boston, MA?
To use any special syntaxes, enclose the query in quotes:
"intitle:windows".
The next tip is a little backwards. If you want to specify a phrase, do not use quotes; Smackdown, by default, searches for a phrase. If you want to search for the two words on one page but not necessarily as a phrase (jolly ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.