Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information [Paperback]

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 advanced 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 an 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.

Topics covered: how to get the most from the Google search engine by using its Web-accessible features (including product searches, image searches, news searches, and newsgroup searches) and the large collection of desktop-resident toolbars available, as well as its advanced search syntax. Other sections have to do with programming with the Google API and simple "scrapes" of results pages, while further coverage addresses how to get your Web page to feature prominently in Google keyword searches. --David Wall, Amazon.com --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

"All in all "Google Hacks" is a fun book to read through and to play with the examples to see what you get." Linux Magazine, September 2003 "In-dept details on getting the most from Google, including site optimisation and submission tips for Web developers." MacUser, December 12th 2003 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Now that new features and services such as Google Maps, Google Talk, and Google Desktop have been added to the expanding Google universe, we've made the third edition of this bestseller into an infinitely more useful book for this powerful search engine. You'll not only find dozens of hacks for new Google services, but plenty of updated tips, tricks and scripts for hacking the old ones.

#13 Using Full-Word Wildcards

Google’s full-word wildcard stands in for any keyword in a query.

Some search engines support a technique called "stemming."Stemming is adding a wildcard character —usually *(asterisk)but sometimes ?(question mark)—to part of your query, requesting the search engine return variants of that query using the wildcard as a placeholder for the rest of the word at hand. For example,moon*would find:moons, moonlight,moonshot,etc.

Google doesn ’t support stemming.

Instead, Google offers the full-word wildcard. While you can ’t have a wildcard stand in for part of a word,you can insert a wildcard (Google’s wildcard character is *) into a phrase and have the wildcard act as a substitute for one full word.Searching for "three *mice",therefore,finds:three blind mice, three blue mice,three green mice,etc.

What good is the full-word wildcard?It ’s certainly not as useful as stemming, but then again, it ’s not as confusing to the beginner. One *is a stand-in for one word; two *signifies two words,and so on. The full-word wild-card comes in handy in the following situations:

•Avoiding the 10 word limit [Hack #5] on Google queries. You ’ll most frequently run into these examples when you ’re trying to find song lyrics or a quote;plugging the phrase "Fourscore and seven years ago,our fathers brought forth on this continent "into Google will search only as far as the word "on," every word after that will be ignored by Google.

•Checking the frequency of certain phrases and derivatives of phrases, like:intitle:"methinks the *doth protest too much"and intitle:"the
*of Seville".

•Filling in the blanks on a fitful memory.Perhaps you remember only a short string of song lyrics; search only using what you remember rather than randomly reconstructed full lines.

Let ’s take as an example the disco anthem "Good Times "by Chic. Consider the line:"You silly fool,you can ’t change your fate."

Perhaps you ’ve heard that lyric,but you can ’t remember if the word "fool "is correct or if it ’s something else.If you ’re wrong (if the correct line is,for example,"You silly child, you can ’t change your fate "), your search will find no results and you ’ll come away with the sad conclusion that no one on the Internet has bothered to post lyrics to Chic songs.

The solution is to run the query with a wildcard in place of the unknown word,like so:

You can use this technique for quotes,song lyrics,poetry,and more. You should be mindful, however,to include enough of the quote that you find unique results. Searching for "you *fool"will glean you far too many false hits. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.