Search engines for large collections of data preceded the World Wide Web by decades. There were those massive library catalogs, hand-typed with painstaking precision on index cards and eventually, to varying degrees, automated. There were the large data collections of professional information companies such as Dialog and LexisNexis. Then there are the extant private, expensive medical, real estate, and legal search services.



Those data collections were not always easy to search, but with a little finesse and a lot of patience, it was always possible to search them thoroughly. Information was grouped according to established ontologies, the data preformatted according to particular guidelines.-Why Google Hacks?

Hacks are generally considered to be "quick-and-dirty" solutions to programming problems or interesting techniques for getting a task done. But what does this kind of hacking have to do with Google?



Considering the size of the Google index, there are many times when you might want to do a particular kind of search but you get too many results for the search to be useful. Or you may want to do a search that the current Google interface does not support.



The idea of Google Hacks is not to give you some exhaustive manual of how every command in the Google syntax works (although we do give this more than a fair shake), but rather to show you some tricks for making the best use of a search, show off just what s possible when you automate your queries with a little programming know-how, and shine a light into some of the overlooked corners of Google s offerings. In other words, hacks.