Everyone loves Google, and it's the first place many people turn to locate information on the Internet. There's a big gap, though, between knowing that you can use Google to get advance information on your blind date and having a handle on the considerable roster of fact-finding tools that the site makes available. Google Hacks reveals--and documents in considerable detail--a large collection of Google capabilities that many readers won't have even been aware of. Want to find the best price on a pair of leg warmers? Try the Froogle price-searcher that's hidden within the Google site. Interested in finding weblog commentary about a particular subject? Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest call your attention to the special Google syntaxes for that purpose. This book makes it clear that there's lots more to the Google site than typing in a few keywords and trusting the search engine to yield useful results.

If you're a programmer--or even just familiar with a HTML or a scripting language--Google opens up even further. A large part of Google Hacks concerns itself with the Google API (the collection of capabilities that Google exposes for use by software) and other programmers' resources. For example, the authors include a simple Perl application that queries the Google engine with terms specified by the user. They also document XooMLe, which delivers Google results in XML form. In brief, this is the best compendium of Google's lesser-known capabilities available anywhere, including the Google site itself. --David Wall

Indispensable Google reference

Google is like an iceberg - a huge entity, of which only a small amount is visible. Millions of casual users find Google quite usable and helpful. Yet there are many who would like to take advantage of the full capabilities of Google. Once harnessed, Google becomes an even more invaluable and indispensable tool.

Like an iceberg, there is a giant mass hidden beyond Google's simple interface. There are now more than 30 books on Google and two of the most beneficial ones are those that detail those hidden powers of Google, namely Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching and Google Hacking for Penetration Testers. Rather than overlapping, these books are complementary and focus on different uses of Google.

Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching is helpful reference for any Google user who wants to get the most out of their searching experience. The book's 9 chapters detail 100 tips for different functionalities within Google. The bulk of the book is in the first 2 chapters, which contain 49 hacks for use of the basic Google Web interface. Hacks such as optimizing search entries, proximity searches, and Google Indexes are detailed. The book does a very good job in showing how to perform specific searches to glean the most-needed information.

The other chapters detail how to optimize often less-used areas of Google including images, news, and groups, and Gmail (the Google mail application).

Chapter 9, Programming Google, is valuable for programmers. The chapter details the use of the Google API (the collection of capabilities that Google exposes for use by third-party software). The book includes Perl scripts that can query the Google engine with terms specified by the user.

Much of the information in the book can be found in various parts Google itself, but the key is to know where to find it and how to look for it. Google Hacks provides that information in a well-written and organized format for those that need the assistance. If any of your work relies on using Google, Google Hacks should be part of it.

Ever more stuff to love about Google...

It seems like nary a month goes by that I don't learn something new about Google that hooks me ever more deeply into the site. After reading Google Hacks (2nd Edition) by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly), I have enough "hooks" for the next year...

Chapter list: Web; Advanced Web; Images; News and Groups; Add-Ons; Gmail; Ads; Webmastering; Programming Google; Index

You probably know it by now, but the Hacks concept is built around 100 cool tips, tricks, and "hacks" related to the particular subject of the book. In this case, the subject is Google. I must have missed the first edition, because I don't remember ever reading any of this material in this form before. The first chapter deals with basic search tricks like mapping (#7 - Think Global, Google Local) and stock tracking (#8 - Track Stocks). Nothing incredibly new there that I haven't seen elsewhere, even though I may not always remember it when I need to. :-) The advanced section starts to pick up with things like #46 - Spot Trends with Geotargeting and #47 - Bring the Google Calculator to the Command Line. Learning how to "browse" the World Wide photo album in #51 was cool. For me, the book completely earned its keep with the gmail chapter. I didn't know about "plus addressing", which really rocks. And based on #79 - Use Gmail as a Windows Drive, I now have a 1 GB spare hard drive that I can use to transfer 10 MB files (or less) from home to work and back... Tres cool!

If you have a background in programming, you'll get even more out of the book. There are plenty of scripting examples using Perl, Python, and other languages that allow you to manipulate the Google API to integrate Google features into your applications. But even if that's not your forte, you'll still benefit a lot from the non-programming tips. Especially if you've never taken a lesson in the search syntax that Google provides.

If Google is your search engine of choice but you've never gotten beyond the basic search interface, you need this book. There's a whole world out there you know nothing about... Highly recommended.

Great book

This is a great book with plenty of sample code - mostly in Perl, so if you're not familiar with Perl take that into consideration. About half of the hacks you could probably find on Google's web site with the other half being true "Google hacks".

I thought one of the more interesting hacks was #91 Remove your Materials from Google. It describes how to prevent Google from storing your information as well as how to get it removed once Google has it.