Google Hacks

For the past few years Google has been the crowned king of the search engines and the preferred search engine of choice for most. The engineering team at Google have worked to sustain this and behind the simple search screen lie a wide variety of extended tools for searching specific environments. Many will be familiar with the advanced search options and the images tab.

What many Google users won’t have realised (and what most don’t need to worry about) is that much of Google is open to automated access from a variety of methods. This book sets out those ‘hacks’.

The book commences with ‘ordinary’ Google and it’s special services before moving into how the Google API can be accessed. Initially through third-party services and then general and specific programming techniques. The 100 ‘hacks’ provided will be of interest to the website professional but also as a challenge to A level computer science students or 1st year undergraduates (many use items of Perl or other code).

This is a book that deserves time and would direct the would-be hacker into a useful direction. Having said that Chapters 1 and 2 provide a superb introduction to the power of Google and would be of interest to all web-miners.