May/June 2005 | Home

Book Review: Google Hacks

by Dara Golden
DMV Contributing Editor

Dara Golden is the former Interim Editor of Connection, the Silicon Valley Chapter’s newsletter.

Google Hacks

Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest
Copyright 2005, ISBN 0596008570

Overview

Google Hacks provides information about implementing “quick and dirty” solutions to programming problems with the Google search engine. The information in this book covers a wide range: improving general searches, integrating Google into a word processor, and improving your web page ranking.

Audience

This book is part of O'Reilly’s “Hacks” series, designed to bring hacking down to the consumer level. While I use Google, I am not a programmer and I found that the coding, mainly using CGI and Perl, was beyond my knowledge. O'Reilly does have the scripts available from their web site, which is helpful for those with programming experience.

Content

The book is divided into different sections: web, images, news and groups, add-ons, Gmail, ads, webmastering, and programming. Hacks are scattered throughout the sections, usually related to the topic area. In the web section, there are many hints for improving your web searching, such as the Google ten-word search limit, wildcards, date ranges, and searching within certain web sites. Some of the hacks reference pages outside of Google, although they use the Google search engine.

Some of the hacks seem more amusing than useful. One hack that consumes ten pages is the Search Engine Belt Buckle made from a PDA that displays a scrolling list of searches performed on Google.

As a Mac user, I liked that directions for running the hacks were provided for Mac, UNIX, Linux, and Windows users. Additionally, if a hack could only be run on one platform, such as the Word add-on, it was noted. The authors have notes and warnings throughout the book and they provide very helpful tips, such as the version of Java required to run the hack, or hacks that run well together.

Usability

As a former editor, I had many problems with the writing style of this book. There are multiple authors and each has their own voice. One author clearly listed step-by-step instructions, while another made assumptions of knowledge. There are forward references without page numbers, which I found frustrating to follow. There is even one hack that references itself! On the positive side, the table of contents and index are well laid out.

Conclusion

This book was written by geeks for geeks. It was also written for people comfortable with hacks and coding. The book looks promising in those areas, but I do not have the expertise to know that for certain. For general Google users wanting to improve their searches, the first 30 pages provide excellent instructions. The rest of the book is mostly focused on solutions relying on coding, so I suggest you look through the book before purchasing it. It may also help to know a programmer who can help explain some of the coding if you want to try any of the examples.

Sample hacks and all code examples from the book are downloadable from the O’Reilly web site.

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