Google Pocket Guide
Book Review by Rip Yarnall
Ask Google for free sex, and you’ll get nearly 15 million website addresses to click and visit. You may not live long enough to check them all out. Put quotes around your request, “free sex”, and you’ll get a list of only about two million web addresses. Much more manageable
If you’ve used Google at all, you probably already knew that the first search, examining the full text of roughly three billion (3,000,000,000) websites, returns sites that mention free or sex anywhere in their respective texts. The second search, using the quotation marks, limits the returns to sites with that exact string of words somewhere in them.
Google Pocket Guide offers dozens upon dozens of ways to make this search engine (so popular its name is now a verb-“Have you Googled anyone today?”) work more efficiently for you. You will learn how to limit your search to words in the name of a site or in a specified domain; and how with Google’s wildcards you can overcome the ten key- word search limit.
The guide is divided into five parts:
What Can You Do With Google-an overview of features and facets.Asking For What You Want-constructing search queries using Google’s special syntax and search features.
Understanding What You Get-getting the most from the information you’re handed.
Other Google Services and Features-stuff you never dreamed Google could do.
Appendix-two reference sections: a syntax summary and a discussion of Julian dates.
The Google Pocket Guide, derived from O’Reilly’s earlier book, Google Hacks, provides a well-organized, thorough-but-concise guide to Google’s features that’ll make you the neighborhood Internet search expert in short order. You can do so much more than just search on some key words. For instance: Search on the word “Hillary” and then if you’re brave enough click on “Images” and check out some of the 14,000 pictures Google will find. The possibilities are endless and this little pocket guide will show you how to pursue them.
Happy Googling.
Google Pocket Guide
By Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest and D.J. Adams
Publisher: O’Reilly and Associates, Inc.,
1005 Gravenstein Hwy N,
Sebastopol, CA 95472,
www.oreilly.com
$9.95 USD