Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Introduction

By now there’s no way to have missed the Internet. Over the past twelve years, it’s become a major factor in communications and business—arguably revolutionizing both. You can harness the Internet’s awesome power to find recipes for ginger maple fudge ice cream and send the best one to your grandmother on another continent. You can use it to pay bills, look up your high school sweetheart’s current phone number, and find out the common side effects for your allergy shots. You can do your grocery shopping, check your baseball team’s box scores, or auction off the Rollerblades you used only once.

In fact, you can do practically everything online these days, thanks to a Web that’s truly worldwide and growing by millions of pages per day. But all those goodies are useful only if you can find them—which would be no problem if the Internet had a complete index or a tidy table of contents…but it doesn’t. Not even close.

A Little History

The Internet is really just an ever-growing series of interconnected computer networks that has been around since the late 1960s. Initially, the people who roamed the Internet were military officials, scientists, computer programmers, and other geek types who could deal with what was then a user-hostile system. All you saw were endless lines of words, and everything you did required an arcane text command. There were no photos, and there was no clicking. Instead, there were a lot of dull amber monitors and a ton of typing.

By the early 1990s, people ...