Somewhere in the mountain of reading material that crossed this desk in the summer of 2003 I saw a news article about another consolidation of firms that run search engines of various flavours. The essence of the story is there are only two super-search companies left, and everything else seems to be smoke and mirrors as front ends into these two firms. One-half the answer heads this page; the other is Yahoo.

So what do we do? Yahoo requires one to beg and pray, or pay, a live person to review, categorize and rank a new or changed Web site. New listings are increasing difficult to place without payment. Google operates a spider and once the spider visits a site it is likely to continue indexing and updating the findings.

Search engines send out what are called spiders, crawlers
or robots to visit your site and gather [data from] web pages.

The consumer, the end-user, who can effectively search Google's massive holdings holds a significant advantage over the casual user who just types in a few words. Computer books hardly read like a spy novel, but this one held our attention for several evenings and now stays close as a ready reference:

O'Reilly, Sebastopol, California, USA. Tera Calishain & Rael Dornfest. Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools. ISBN 0-597-00447-8, first published 2003.

Two hacks are absolutely marvelously, and these just start off the book. Adjustments to Google Preferences begins the job of making Google work better. Go to the bottom of the Preferences page. Google by default returns 10 results per page. Change it to 100.

As this is all text based, there should be no change in speed. Next, for the Results Window, click the check box to open the results in a new window.

Save your changes (cookies must be enabled) and test your work. With the second change, you won't have to repeatedly scroll down the long Yahoo results list.

The book has a supplemental Web site with additional hacks.

More Google hacks can be found within BuzzTool Blog, a revised Web site replacing Happy Piles of Google Hacks. The blog appeared in September 2003.

But not all is sweetness and charm at Google. Those persons who author Google-Watch describe a severe privacy struggle. Nine examples — such as non-expiring data, cookies that expire in 2038, profiling the user based upon data searches — are cited in nominating Google for a Big Brother award.

Toolbars

Toolbars are customized add-on menus to Web browsers designed to build more traffic on the sponsoring Web site.

Some Internet users prefer to be a minimalist when it comes to using a browser because screen space is at a premium. Graphical menus are replaced by text menus, and extra lines of menus are closed. On the other hand, some third-party toolbars are useful and Google has two main ones:

• Google Toolbar (for Internet Explorer 5.0 and greater)
• Mozdev Googlebar (for Mozilla)
• Google Search: google toolbars (shows specialized toolbars, including other than in English and related sites)

20 Great Google Secrets

One Tara Calishain wrote an article for PC Magazine dated 28 October 2003, highlighting specialized services such as shopping, experimental voice searching via the telephone, and searching within a timeframe. And there is an API that enables e-mail searching, returning the first 10 results for the query back. As Calishain writes, "if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn't do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know." This link is to the 91-page print-ready version... easy to read without the adverts.

Maximum Google

Better late than never, I found Steve Bass's June 2003 PC World article of "more than 25 ways to customize your Google searches; locate the sites, images, and news you want faster; and train Google to work even smarter--more the way you do." It's an interesting read. Bass predicates some of the tips on using the IE Google Toolbar. Our readers know better; we have links to other Google toolbars above.

Feedback?

Comments, suggestions, corrections, additions are welcome. Please e-mail me.