GOOGLE HACKS
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
Book Review by Diana F. ArsenaultGoogle is the 1998 second incarnation of a search engine known as BackRub. Google indexes more than 2.4 billion web pages in more than 30 languages and conducts more than 150 million searches a day.
Google Hacks is a collection of one hundred tips and tools gathered from expert users and developers.
There are two types of search engines. The first is called a searchable subject index. This kind of search engine searches only the titles and descriptions of websites and doesn’t search individual web pages.
Then there are the full-text search engines. They use "spiders" to index millions of web pages, sometimes billions of pages. These search engines search by title or content. Google is a full-text search engine.
Google’s Boolean default is AND; that means if you enter query words without modifiers, Google will search for all of them. If you search for:
Snowblower Honda “Green Bay”
Google will search for all the words. If you want to specify that either word is acceptable, you put an OR between each item:
Snowblower OR snowmobile OR “Green Bay”
If you want to definitely have one term and have one of two or more other terms, you group them with parentheses, like this:
Snowblower (snowmobile OR “Green Bay”)
This query searches for the word “snowmobile” or phrase “Green Bay” along with the word “snowblower.” A stand-in for OR borrowed from the computer programming realm is the | (pipe) character, as in:
Snowblower (snowmobile | “Green Bay”)
If you want to specify that a query term must not appear in your results, use a - (minus sign or dash).
Snowblower snowmobile - “Green Bay”
This will search for pages that contain both the words “snowblower and snowmobile but not the phrase “Green Bay”.
Google supports the * (asterisk) as a full word wildcard. If you searched for:
Three * mice
Google would find: three blind mice, three blue mice, three red mice, etc.
Google has special syntaxes that allow you search specific parts of web pages, such as:
Intitle: intitle:help restricts your search to the titles of web pages. The variation, “allintitle:help FAQ” finds pages wherein all the words specified make up the title of the web page.
Inurl: inurl:help restricts your search to the URLs of web pages. “Allinurl:help FAQ” variation finds all the words listed in a URL.
Intext: intext:help searches only body text (ignores link text, URLs and titles). “Allintext:help FAQ” variation finds all words in the text.
Inanchor: inanchor:help searches for text in a page’s link anchors.
The foregoing examples are just a small taste of the wonderful and exciting ways that you can perform searches using Google. It’s not possible to give you all 100 tips in this review. If you like to find what you’re looking for quickly when using a search engine, then this book is definitely worth the cover price.GOOGLE HACKS 100 Industrial Strength Tips & Tools
by Tara Calishain & Rael Dornfest
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(800) 998-9938
www.oreilly.com <http://www.oreilly.com/>
Price: $ 24.95 US
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