How This Book Is Organized

The combination of Google's myriad services and over four billion pages of constantly shifting data can do strange things to your imagination and give you lots of new perspectives on how best to search. This book goes beyond the instruction page to the idea of hacks: tips, tricks, and techniques you can use to make your Google searching experience more fruitful, more fun, or (in a couple of cases) just more weird.

This book is divided into several chapters:

Chapter 1, Web

This chapter describes the fundamentals of how Google's search works. You'll find tips and tricks for Google's special syntax (think "special sauce"); specialty searches like the phonebook, calculator, package and stock tracking; the Google cache, related links, and more. Beyond a mere list of "this syntax means that," we'll take a look at how to eke every last bit of searching power out of each syntax—and how to mix and match for some truly monstrous searches.

Chapter 2, Advanced Web

Kick your newfound search expertise into high gear, automating your trawling, crawling, and recombination by hacking Google programmatically. You'll meander farther, dig deeper, and come up with results that you never would have found by letting your fingers do the walking and eyeballs the scanning.

Chapter 3, Images

Take a break from all that text crawling and immerse yourself in some of the millions of photographs, drawings, icons, and diagrams that Google Images has turned up in the process of crawling and indexing the Web.

Chapter 4, News and Groups

Catch up on the day's news and events as brought to you by Google News. Get involved in a group discussion on the Internet or start a Google Group of your own.

Chapter 5, Add-Ons

Go beyond the web browser, integrating Google into your toolbar, desktop, and word processor. Take advantage of some of the services built on Google. Search on the go via email or instant messenger, from your phone or PDA.

Chapter 6, Gmail

Google's Gmail© isn't your average, ordinary web mail service. From its slick, interactive, real-application-like JavaScript-powered web interface to its gigabyte of storage space, there's more than enough to make you switch. And then there are the alternate uses you just won't believe until you try.

Chapter 7, Ads

Google's AdSense© brings subtle, mostly text ads to your web site or weblog—no matter how large or how small. And AdWords© breaks down the barrier to entry for getting your business or project found on the Net.

Chapter 8, Webmastering

If you're a web wrangler, you see Google from two sides: from the searcher side and from the side of someone who wants to get the best search ranking for a web site. In this chapter, you'll learn about Google's (in)famous PageRank©, how to clean up for a Google visit, and how to make sure that your pages aren't indexed by Google if you don't want them to be.

Chapter 9, Programming Google

This chapter introduces you to the wonders of the Google Application Programming Interface (API) underlying many of the hacks in this book. If you've ever been tempted to try your hand at programming, this is as good a place as any to find inspiration.