Sams google search and tools in a snap apr 2006 ISBN 0672328690

You just want a book that will quickly show you how to do things with Google Tools, like perform power searches, find pictures with Google Images, find online bargains with Froogle, use

By Preston Gralla

Publisher: Sams Pub Date: April 04, 2006 Print ISBN-10: 0-672-32869-0 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-672-32869-5 Pages: 360

Table of Contents | Index

These days, nobody really wants to learn everything there is about a product like Google Tools And even if you did, who has the time to endlessly tinker and play with it until you figure everything out? You just want a book that will quickly show you how to do things with Google Tools, like perform power searches, find pictures with Google Images, find online bargains with Froogle, use the Google Toolbar, and discover the world with Google Earth

Google Search and Tools in a Snap does just that Organized into a series of well-organized, bite-sized, quickly accomplished tasks, the book lets you zero right in on the one particular task you want to accomplish, quickly figure out what to do, do it, and then get back to using the plethora of Google Tools.

By Preston Gralla

Publisher: Sams Pub Date: April 04, 2006 Print ISBN-10: 0-672-32869-0 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-672-32869-5 Pages: 360

Index

Google™ Search and Tools in a Snap

Copyright © 2006 by Sams Publishing

All rights reserved No part of this book shall be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without written permission from the publisher No patent

liability is assumed with respect to the use of the informationcontained herein Although every precaution has been taken inthe preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume

no responsibility for errors or omissions Nor is any liabilityassumed for damages resulting from the use of the informationcontained herein

regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or servicemark

Google is a trademark of Google, Inc

Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and

as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied.The information provided is on an "as is" basis The author andthe publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to anyperson or entity with respect to any loss or damages arisingfrom the information contained in this book

Bulk Sales

Sams Publishing offers excellent discounts on this book whenordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales For

Preston Gralla has been using Google since the days when it

was an obscure, little-known website that claimed to have

better search tools than anyone else He quickly concluded thatthey were right Preston is a best-selling author of more than

30 books that have been translated into 20 languages, including

How the Internet Works, How to Expand and Upgrade PCs, How Wireless Works, and many others A well-known technology

guru, he has made many television and radio appearances

including the CBS Early Show, CNN, MSNBC, and ABC World News Now He has also done occasional commentaries about technology for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Gralla has published articles about technology for many national

newspapers and magazines, including USA Today, the Los

Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News (for which he was a technology columnist), and PC Magazine He was the founding managing editor of PC Week and founding editor, editor, and editorial director of PC/Computing He also received the award

for the Best Feature in a Computer Publication from the

Computer Press Association

Gralla is editor-in-chief of the Case Study Forum, which

specializes in writing case studies for technology companies Helives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Lydia, son

Gabe, and daughter Mia, who occasionally visits from college

Thanks, as always, to my wife Lydia, son Gabe, and daughterMia Thanks to Betsy Brown for entrusting me with the project;

to Alice Martina Smith for focused, heads-up editing; to TonyaSimpson for keeping the project on track; and to Heather

Wilkins for eagle-eyed attention to conventions Thanks also toGreg Perry, Erika Millen, and Heather Waye Arle for their input

in improving all aspects of this book

As the reader of this book, you are our most important critic

and commentator We value your opinion and want to know

what we're doing right, what we could do better, what areasyou'd like to see us publish in, and any other words of wisdomyou're willing to pass our way

You can email or write me directly to let me know what you did

or didn't like about this bookas well as what we can do to makeour books stronger

Please note that I cannot help you with technical problems

related to the topic of this book, and that due to the high

volume of mail I receive, I might not be able to reply to every message.

When you write, please be sure to include this book's title andauthor as well as your name and phone or email address I willcarefully review your comments and share them with the authorand editors who worked on the book

Visit our website and register this book at

updates, downloads, or errata that might be available for thisbook

Was the Internet searchable before there was Google?

Sometimes it seems as if it wasn't True, there were other

search sites, such as www.altavista.com, www.askjeeves.com,

remembers that, although they made it easy to search for

something, they made it very difficult to actually find anything.

Then Google came along, and suddenly the world changed Itapplied its "special sauce" to searching, and the rest is history.Put simply, no search site on the planet comes near to Google

in the speed and accuracy of its searches

But if you think searching is all that Google is about, you'remissing a lot Google offers loads of services in addition to

searching, such as maps, email, personalized home pages, freeblogging, image-editing software…the list is long and gettinglonger every day

This book will help you get the most out of using Google and all

of its tools Whether you want to blog, send and receive mail,take a virtual trip around the world, find a long-lost high schoolsweetheart, get a great deal online, or a lot more, you've come

to the right place

Let's start off with the most basic question: Why bother to useGoogle? After all, there are other search sites out there

It's true that there are other search sites, but none are as fast

or effective as Google Google doesn't necessarily scan more ofthe Web and index more websites than any other search

engine That's not really what's important What it does betterthan any other site is deliver more accurate results At times,the results seem so uncanny that you almost feel as if Google isreading your mind (You'll learn more details about why Google

graphic-rich ads, they were slow to load, and you often had towade through a great deal of advertising and unnecessary

material until you got what you wanted

With Google, your results are front and center

There are reasons beyond accuracy and presentation to useGoogle as well Google is constantly coming up with new tools

to integrate searching and other Web services into your life

Google Desktop, for example, can search your hard disk in the

same way that Google searches the Web, and you can even seeboth sets of results at the same timewhat's on your PC as well

as what's on the Web And there are plenty of other exampleslike this

Before you can understand how Google works, you probablyshould have a basic idea of how the Web works When you visit

a website, your browser is actually contacting a web server, acomputer whose job is to deliver web pages So when you click

a link, your browser contacts the server and says, "Send methis page." The server takes the request and then sends thepage to the browser, which displays it on your computer

In some very basic ways, Google works just like other search engines Its basic operations are exactly the same Like allsearch engines, Google is composed of three parts:

crawls the Web once a month Obviously, many sites changemore than once a month, and so Google also has a crawler

named FreshBot that crawls pages constantly.

The Indexer

The spiders send information about all the pages they find tothe indexer part of the search engine The indexer then does apretty amazing jobit creates an index of every word on everypage sent to it by the Google spider Not only does it indexevery word and every URL, it also keeps a record of whereevery word is on every page

A single server wouldn't be able to keep up with all the searchrequests that are done

And it all happens in a fraction of a second

Google's Special Sauce

All this search engine logic is nothing new or revolutionary Thistechnology has been around for years, long before Google was

a glimmer in its founders' eyes

So why is Google so good at what it does?

Google uses better algorithms than any other search engine,and constantly refines them Algorithms are sets of rules forperforming a particular task In Google's case, its algorithmsare responsible for taking your search request and deciding

which results to show you

Key Term

Google's case, algorithms are what determines

which pages it says match your search requests

Google's algorithms aren't particularly easy for mere mortals tounderstand, they're changing all the time, and they're not madepublic Google uses more than 100 factors in its algorithms Forevery search you do, it considers all of those factors and thencalculates a score for every possible matching page The pagewith the highest score is the first search result The page withthe second-highest score is the second search result, and so on

Some of the metrics are fairly obviousthe search term needs toappear on a page, for example Google's algorithms also factor

in the number of times the term appears on a page, whetherthe term appears on a prominent part of a page, whether it

appears in the title of a page, and many other factors

None of this is particularly revolutionary, either Many searchengines do the same thing

Google's real brilliance is in harnessing the collective

intelligence of the Web to figure out what was truly relevant,instead of merely relying on these kinds of rules Google alsogives a great deal of weight to the number and kinds of pagesthat link to a web page For example, Google figures that if aweb page has many sites linking to it, the odds are very goodthat the page is an important one And if important sites arelinking to that page, it's even more important

So Google calculates a page rank for each page, and that pagerank becomes a very important part of the calculation as well.For example, you do a search, and Google finds your searchterm five times on a page to which hardly any pages link, but

Google, as mentioned previously, is more than a search engine

It provides a whole complex of sites and services that this bookrefers to as Google tools These tools include things such as

Gmail web service, Google Local (previously called Google Maps) search service, and Google Desktop for searching your

computer

Google is such a great search site, but why bother using Googletools? These tools are in many ways as remarkable as the

Toolbar is used as an example of how to install software (To

see other downloadable tools, go to www.google.com, click the

More link at the top of the page, and then click the Google Downloads link on the left side of the page.)

allowed to use the software, as you can see in the nearbyfigure It's written in a language that only lawyers could

love Read it, click Agree & Continue, and then follow the

instructions onscreen

Follow the instructions, read the Terms and Conditions, click Agree & Continue, and you are ready to go.

[View full size image]

5 At the end, click Finish Restart your computer if you're

told to do so If you have to restart your computer, save allyour open files and close all your open programs before yourestart

Many of the Google tools or services that are websites, such as

Gmail, require that you sign up for a Google account After you

have set up an account, you won't have to set it up again Youcan use your single Google account as the centerpiece for all ofGoogle's services

To sign up, head to www.google.com and click Sign In On the right side of the page that appears, click the Create an

account now link The page shown in the nearby figure

appears

Fill in an email address, enter a password and retype it, chooseyour location, type what you see as the weird-looking text in

the Word Verification area, read the Terms of Service, and then click I accept Create my account That's all it takes;

Fill out this page and click I accept Create my account Then

you are ready to use all of Google's services.

[View full size image]

If people fear one thing about Google, it's that Google mightinvade their privacy in some way That's a natural fear As

Google creates more and more services, it can gather an

increasing amount of information about you And there are alsoworries that Google tracks all of your searches, and it couldthen easily create a personal profile of you and sell the results

to the highest bidder

If you want the whole story of Google's privacy policy, head tothe Google Privacy Center at www.google.com/privacy.html Itspells out in a good deal of detail what information Google findsout about you and what it does with that information

But here, in a nutshell, is the scoop: When you create a Googleaccount, you need to enter basic informationyour email addressand password Google doesn't share that information with anyother website

information, and they can use it to identify you and the

searches you do They can subpoena your ISP and find out thesubscriber name of the person with the IP address at a giventime So based on Google logs and information provided by

your ISP, law enforcement officials can identify you and whatyou do on Google Google complies with subpoenas

Google also uses cookies, which are small bits of data placed

on your computer that Google uses to recognize you when youlog in Cookies can store your personal preferences and otherinformation For example, Google uses a cookie to recognizethat you have a Google account, so you don't have to log inevery time to use some Google services

to an individual So, for example, it might collect informationabout what pages are most popular among Google visitors Itaggregates information from many people's Web-surfing

Google is far more than a search siteit has grown to be a

sizable collection of services and tools, and the collection is

getting larger all the time No longer is Google a single searchsite; instead, it's a conglomeration of multiple sites And nolonger can you even call it Web-based because Google now

includes software that you download and run on your PC

This book often refers to tools and services Although there is alot of gray area in the definitions of these two terms, generally

Because of that, before reading the rest of the book, it's a goodidea to take a quick tour of Google so you can find the newesttools and services on your own

into Google because the links include Personalized Home,

Search History,My Account, and Sign Out If I hadn't been

logged in, only two links would be there: Sign In and

Personalized Home (And when I clicked the Personalized Home link, I'd first have to sign in before I could get to my Personalized Home page.)

Google's main page is command central for Google's tools and services.

[View full size image]

Home link to go to a personalized, customizable home page

that includes news stories, information feeds, stock and

weather information, and more (For details on how to set it up,start with About Google Personalized Home.) Click the

Search History link and you come to a page that includes all

the searches you've done while you've been logged into yourGoogle account (See Add Bookmarks and Your Search History to Google Personalized Home ) The My Account

search history, and so on

Now look at the links just above the search box These linkslead to several of Google's main services and tools These linksmight change over time, but at the time this book was written,

they linked to Google Image Search (Images); Google

Groups (Groups); Google News (News); Froogle

(Froogle); Google Local, which used to be called Google Maps (Local); and Google Desktop (Desktop) There's also a more

As you'll see in this book, there are many more Google toolsand services than there are links on Google's front page In

fact, this book doesn't cover all the tools and services that

Google has because there are too many So how do you find outabout a tool or service, or even discover which ones exist?

link is a great place to go if you want to use Google's manyspecialized searches, such as for package tracking, stock

quotes, music, and more And the Labs link is the place to go if

you want to see what new features Google is cooking up in itslabs New Google tools and services start here Some

experiments don't see the light of day, while others go on tofame and glory

The Google More, more, more page always contains the list of

all Google's tools and services.

[View full size image]

Google search, and then quickly go on to doing more advancedsearches, using special search operators, and getting adviceabout strategies for doing smarter searching