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Title: Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest ISBN: 0-596-00447-8 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.26 (39 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: David Weeks MyMac.com Book Review
Comment: Google is currently the most popular Internet search engine. While almost every Internet searcher is familiar with basics of Google searching, there's far more to Google than meets the eye. Google Hacks tells individual Web searchers and Web site programmers how to best take advantage of Google's tremendous amount of searching power and flexibility.

The first three chapters (Searching Google, Google Special Services and Collections, and Third-Party Google Services) are targeted at the end user. They present a wealth of detail about how to access Google features most users didn't know about (myself included): wild cards, date range searches, spell checking, phone book, translations, and more. You'll learn Google has special directories of images, newsgroups, and mail-order catalogs. (I made sure to NOT tell my wife about the on-line catalog feature!)

The balance of the book is for web site programmers. They get plenty of tips and tricks about how to incorporate Google search technology into their web sites. While many of the tips are not for novice web programmers, most intermediate webmasters can spruce up their sites with the tools presented in Google Hacks.

The production quality is typical O'Reilly, and that means good! Clear screen shots, and crisp dark type make this read easy on the eyes.

If you want to learn how to exploit Google searching, or want to add Google search features to your web site, Google Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools is a good place to begin the learning process.

MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5

Rating: 4
Summary: Something for Everyone
Comment: This book is useful, fun and, in parts, bemusing. It presents one hundred numbered "hacks" that range from simple, but very useful tips, to moderately ambitious programming efforts.

The great strength of "Google Hacks" is that it has something for everyone. The first few chapters are perfect for those who have no knowledge of programming. The bulk of the book is appropriate for those who have at least some programming experience and are interested in accessing Google programatically. There are many examples scattered throughout that will be of interest to webmasters who want something cool for their website. The final chapter, "The Webmaster Side of Google", is devoted to managing your web site's lineament on Google.

Particularly appealing is the fact that, although most of the programmatic hacks are in Perl, there are examples in no fewer than nine languages. Html, java, php, python, C#, .NET, VB, asp, and possibly other languages, are represented.

Many of the simple tips presented early in the book illuminate useful methods that Google.com itself should do a better job promoting. Google's special syntaxes are a prime example. Want to find John Doe in Mira Mesa? Enter "rphonebook: John Doe 92126" in google's text box. The rphonebook: tells google to look in the residential phone book. 92126 is the zip code for Mira Mesa. The site syntax is very useful. To quickly find the mirror sites for redhat, use "site:redhat.com mirrors". There are many more special syntaxes that use the colon character

Some of the hacks are for amusement only. One must be in the right mood to properly appreciate the "Google Mirror" hack (#91) or the "The No-Result Search" (#86).

The neighborhood hack (#65) may be the most ambitious in the book. It consists of about five pages of Python code. It collects all the sites that link to a given site, then within the collection determines how many times each site is referred to by one of the others. The hack was written by Mark Pilgrim, who has also published a free Python book. You can try the hack yourself at diveintomark.org, where you'll also find a link to Mark's excellent book.

How quickly will "Google Hacks" become dated? Certainly the web itself is growing exponentially. There can be no doubt that Google will change and grow as well. However, I suspect that the majority of principles exposited will continue to work and be relevant for years to come.

"Google Hacks" came out in Februray 2003; it is mid July as I write this review. Given the length of the publishing pipeline and the rate at which things change on the web, I expected significant portions of the book to be out of date. This was not the case. I only found a couple of urls that had changed as well as a single typographical error. The folks at O'Reilly must have gone over the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb!

Acknowledgment: The review copy of the book was donated by O'Reilly to the Kernel Panic Linux Users Group.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Money-Saving Compilation
Comment: This book is what exactly you expect from O'Reilly - great tips, well written, carefully organized and attractively formatted.

It may be that all this information is available for free at various sites on the internet. That does not detract from the value of having valuable information at your fingertips when you need it. Each hack in the book can be located and read in minutes, saving hours of "free" search time. That alone makes the book's price a bargain.

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