Synopses & Reviews
Go beyond Google's deceptively plain interface to explore the many features of this powerful tool. The new user and the Web-savvy alike will benefit from the many simple and advanced tactics and strategies the authors share for finding information on the Web with Google. Save time with tips to narrow or broaden your Web searches, choose effective search terms, utilize Google search syntax, and understand your search results. Discover useful services such as Images, Answers, Groups, News, Google's bargain-finder Froogle, and much more. And along the way, get fun facts about the company and the people behind Google.
- Find useful information more quickly
- Locate phone numbers, maps, stock information, and get answers to mathematical calculations
- Configure your Web browser to facilitate easier searching
- Filter out sexually explicit content with SafeSearch
- Discover an array of features such as the bargain-finder Froogle, Google News, and Google Images
- Set preferences to specify a search and interface language, the number of search results shown per page, and more
- Learn how the Google search engine works and how new features are created in Google labs
- Use Google's search syntax to narrow your searches
- Formulate questions that get the best results from researchers at Google Answers
About the authors:
Fritz Schneider is a software engineer at Google. He is co-author of JavaScript: The Complete Reference and holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego.
Nancy Blachman gives workshops on searching with Google and wrote an online tutorial, Google Guide. She is an author, and holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where she has taught for eight years.
Eric Fredricksen has been a software engineer at Google for more than three years. He holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University.
Synopsis
- Primary Market: Web novices as well as technical users who wish to improve their web searching skills. Specific audience groups include students, librarians, businesses, researchers, lawyers, journalists, and anyone else who uses the Google search engine on a regular basis.
- Audience Size/Install Base: According to Nielsen/NetRatings March 2003, the Google search engine has approximately 78,000,000 users world-wide, with close to 50 million of these users in the United States. Google processes more than 150 million searches a day, according to Fast Company magazine
- Technology/Product Information: Google is, by most accounts, the best search engine available. And it's the fastest: Google can produce search results in response to queries in 0.2 seconds. In addition to general search capabilities, Google offers several special features, many of them unknown to the average user: Froogle, a bargain finder; News service, which scours online news reports and publications for data in response to queries; Google images, which returns images in response to queries; and more
- Market Conditions: Google has weathered the dot-com downturn, so it seems the popular search engine is here to stay. According to InternetWeek, in 2001, while other e-businesses were cutting back, Google was increasing its infrastructure as fast as it could, doubling the size of its server farm within a 10 month period, to meet its traffic demands.
About the Author
Fritz Schneider (San Diego, CA) is a masters degree student in Computer Science and is a software engineer with Anonymizer.com. While there, he has designed and implemented a variety of Apache modules, written CGI scripts, implemented a Web-based customer e-mail service, and created and maintained a large number of internal and public Web pages. Fritz has also served as a teaching assistant in Web programming and computer science classes at both UCSD and Columbia University.
Table of Contents
Part I: Google Web Search 1: Welcome to Google 2: Craft Your Searches 3: Find Specialized Information 4: Understand Search Results 5: Advanced Web Search 6: Make Searching Easier with Google Tools 7: Configure Google Part II: Google Features 8: Search News Sources with Google News 9: Search Discussion Forums with Google Groups 10: Find Pictures with Google Images 11: Browse Topics by Category with the Google Directory 12: Ask Researchers Questions with Google Answers 13: Find Bargains with Froogle 14: Other Cool Features Appendix: How Google Works