Posted on February 24, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Sherman offers instructions into how much you can do with Google. Way beyond its signature searching ability. Perhaps the most obvious and successful is its news feeds. An excellent way to read from newspapers all over the world.
Also, in its regular searching, Google stores old versions of many pages it spiders. Sometimes you may find this useful, when a website deletes some of its content before you got to it.
Plus, there are the thousands of newsgroups. Ironically, some of these predate Google and the Web itself. They hark back to when the Internet communication was a much simpler text-based mode.
For programmer types, Sherman explains the Google API. Which lets you write code that programmatically hooks up to Google, without the drawbacks of screen scraping.
With several of the Google options that Sherman describes, it is unclear what profit Google ultimately makes out of them, beyond just mindshare. But I guess its search profits are so lucrative that it can afford to bleed on these other options.
Posted on February 25, 2010 at 5:44 am
The book is a bit outdated, but there is nothing anybody can do about it. By the time a book is written, edited, published and finally available for purchase at your local book store did pass so much time that is measured in Google or Internet time a small eternity. Every book to the subject is by default outdated by the time you can buy it.
However, as long as the book provides general truth and methods in addition to specifics, long time value is still guaranteed. I would say this is partially true with this book. It does focus on specifics and most stuff is still true, but a lot of stuff changed since then, in some cases dramatically.
I use Google for years now and consider myself very Internet savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and even I learned some nice tricks from the book.
It comes in handy sometimes and I am sure that it will be useful for a few more years to come, but I would not expect too much from it. I have not found any better book in print format yet, but the best place for this kind of information is actually the Internet itself.
Still, I love to have a print version around. That’s may be just me being old fashioned, but I am sure that I am not the only one out there.
Posted on February 24, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Although this book is well written and contained much information, there was little information included that is not already available on Google’s Help pages for free. Buy this book only if you don’t like reading online help pages.