Sarah Milstein - Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

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Sanders Kleinfeld was the production editor and proofreader for Google: The Missing Manual , Second Edition. Marlowe Shaeffer and Claire Cloutier provided quality control.

The cover of this book is based on a series design by David Freedman. Marcia Friedman produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's Minion and Gill Sans fonts.

David Futato designed the interior layout, based on a series design by Phil Simpson. This book was converted by Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6. The text font is Adobe Minion; the heading font is Adobe Formata Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS.

• 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 (09) and then shows the results for each character on its own tab.

• 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.

• ).

• 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 domaina 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.

• 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.

  UP TO SPEED Google Bombing

  Because Google foils those attempts. But the company has ignored one kind of maneuver, known as Google bombing . Despite its name, the effect of Google bombing is subtle: When you run a search for a word or phrase, an unexpected site or two may appear at the top of your results. For example, the query " miserable failure " brings up the official White House biography of George W. Bush, followed by Michael Moore's site, and later down the list, Hillary Rodham Clinton's official site. Yet the phrase "miserable failure" doesn't appear on any of those sites. What gives? One of the ways Google associates a phrase with a page is by analyzing the text in the anchors linking to that page (anchors are words you click to jump to another page). If a lot of sitesparticularly popular siteslink to a page using specific text, Google will show that page when somebody searches for the texteven if the words aren't anywhere in the destination page itself. Google bombing requires a group of people to set the same anchors on their sites. And for those who can get enough people to join them, the coveted prize is forcing a page to the first position in a listing of Google results for a particular phrase. Political bloggers are among the most successful at marshalling a sufficient number of Web jockeys to influence search results. Although targets of Google bombing sometimes ask Google to remove their pages from results for certain searches, the company has so far declined. It contends that its search results simply reflect what's on the Web and that Google bombing is limited enough that it doesn't pose a threat to the integrity of searches.

  
  

• 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).

• , 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 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.