Book dossier

Google Hacks

by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest

The Internet puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, and all you have to know is how to find it. Google is your ultimate research tool--a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion web pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million searches a day. The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off the Web. You've got a cadre of techniques up your sleeve--tricks you've learned from practice, from exchanging ideas with others, and from plain old trial and error--but you're always looking for better ways to search. It's the "hacker" in you: not the troublemaking kind, but the kind who really drives innovation by trying new ways to get things done. If this is you, then you'll find new inspiration (and valuable tools, too) in Google Hacks from O'Reilly's new Hacks Series. Google Hacks is a collection of industrial-strength, real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. The book offers a variety of interesting ways for power users to mine the enormous amount of information that Google has access to, and helps you have fun while doing it. You'll learn clever and powerful methods for using the advanced search interface and the new Google API, including how to build and modify scripts that can become custom business applications based on Google. Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers. Written by experts for intelligent, advanced users, O'Reilly's new Hacks Series have begun to reclaim the term "hacking" for the good guys. In recent years the term "hacker" has come to be associated with those nefarious black hats who break into other people's computers to snoop, steal information, or disrupt Internet traffic. But the term originally had a much more benign meaning, and you'll still hear it used this way whenever developers get together. Our new Hacks Series is written in the spirit of true hackers--the people who drive innovation. If you're a Google power user, you'll find the technical edge you're looking for in Google Hacks.