Appendix A. The Google Wide Web
Google is a phenomenon so huge, it’s inspired a cottage industry of third-party sites either discussing it or using its index to do funky search tricks. Here are just some of the best and brightest.
Note
As of this writing, all of these Web addresses are working in the most recent versions of most modern browsers. If you have trouble using one of these services, upgrade your browser or try a different one. Should you find a URL that doesn’t work (it happens), report it at www.missingmanuals.com.
Sites That Use Google
www.googlefight.com. This site lets you type in two queries, and then it runs a search to see which is more popular. Find out who’s mentioned more often on the Web, cats or dogs; Janet Jackson or Justin Timberlake; George Bush or burning bush. Don’t miss the funny fights (found under the links on the left side of the page). Another site, www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp offers a similar service.
www.googlism.com. Find out what the Web is saying about nearly anything. Type in a word, choose whether it’s a Who, What, Where, or When, and then click the Googlism button to get a nifty list of comments from Google results that mention your term. For example, if you try Tivo, you learn that people have said: “Tivo is theft,” “Tivo is god,” “Tivo is exhausting.”
www.googleblaster.com. Here you can type in multiple queries at once, then click a single button to run the searches simultaneously. The results look like a regular Google page, but each of your searches has its own tab at the top. Handy
when you want to compare a couple of searches to each other. The site also has a fun feature that automatically searches Google for every individual letter of the alphabet or the numerals (0–9) and then shows the results for each character on its own tab.
www.freshgoo.com. Lets you limit search results to pages Google has added to its index within a certain time frame (the date pages were created is a different thing; see Section 2.2.1.2 for an explanation). The next Web page on this list offers a similar feature, along with a nice, geeky explanation of how Google deals with dates.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/cat_google_hacks.shtml. The place to go to use Google to find recipes. Type in your ingredients, then choose a recipe genre, like vegetarian, Atkins, or seafood—and voilà! You get Google results with recipes. This site, by search guru and Google Hacks (O’Reilly) contributor Tara Calishain, hosts a bunch of fun Google tools, like the Search Sinker, which lets you emphasize the word in a Google query that is most important to you; Google Does Poetry (self-explanatory); and a nice collection of Google-specific bookmarklets (Section 7.2).
www.googlerace.com. Type in a word or phrase to find out which political candidates are most highly associated with your terms.
www.staggernation.com. A bare-bones site with three interesting Google searches: GAPS (lets you enter two search terms and find out how closely they appear on Web sites that contain them both), GAWSH (lets you search for terms by domain—a useful way to find out which sites pay the most attention to your search terms), and GARBO (lets you search by URL to find a list of related pages or pages that link to the URL). The “Read Me” file on every page gives tips on using each search.
www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/. An extremely cool visual representation of Google News headlines.
www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/aqgoogle/. Technically, this site doesn’t use Google; it lets you automatically post electronic artwork in Google Groups. The awesome part is that you create the art on this site by filling in a grid with blocks of color. Sounds dull, but it’s actually a procrastination tool not to be mocked.
Note
This book contains discussions of a few other sites that use Google: FaganFinder.com (Section 2.2.1.7) and Soople.com (Section 2.4), for example.
Sites That Discuss Google
www.elgoog.nl/. The mother of all Google-obsessed sites, this one has pages about every aspect of Google, including a very useful listing of Web forums and groups about Google. The Googlemania page lists more sites that use or discuss Google.
http://google.blogspace.com/. This site keeps a tidy list of new features and subtle developments. The site gets tips from Googologists, so if you spend 25 hours a day checking your Google results for new font sizes, file your observations here. You can also sign up for email updates from the site, or for an RSS feed (a geek way of summarizing Web site text).
http://www.topix.net/com/google. A collection of news stories on Google, updated constantly. Another site, www.watchinggooglelikeahawk.com, provides a similar service (despite its name, the site is not anti-Google).
www.squarefree.com/archives/cat_google.html. This blog, by the guy who developed a few bookmarklets discussed in Chapter 7, makes occasional, quirky observations about Google. The site also includes a downloadable Google Relatedness tool, which you can use to measure how often two terms show up together in Google results. Angelina and Brad, anyone?
www.googleguide.com. A site so comprehensive, you could use it as alternative to Google’s online help.
www.googlewhack.com/. Frivolous but fun: a site about Google queries that give you exactly one result.
www.google-watch.org/. A site for those who believe, correctly or not, that Google is evil. Another site, www.google-watch-watch.org, comments on Google-watch.
Google on Google
Google has an email list for press announcements; anyone can sign up. It’s not always the best way to learn about things Google, because Google watchers tend to figure out what’s new and blitz the Web before Google gets around to making official announcements. But occasionally, Google slips something in that you wouldn’t otherwise know about. And there’s no need to worry about overloading your inbox: the announcements are so infrequent, you might wonder whether you’ve even made it onto the list. Sign up at www.google.com/press/index.html.
And don’t overlook the Google Groups on Google. Like most Usenet groups (Section 4.1), the Google discussions about Google can be wildly random, but they can also be a good place to ask questions or search for exchanges on a particular issue. To find the Usenet groups devoted to Google, head over to http://groups.google.com/, and search for google.public to get a list of groups covering Google.