THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES
by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface
Calishain, Tara, and Rael Dornfest.
Google Hacks.
O'Reilly & Associates, 2003.
In editing Interface, and particularly in selecting books to review (18-20 per year) we are continually vexed by the question "who is reading this?" Our readers come from a very broad audience, from students to specialists, but are, while very interested in computers, probably not proficient with them in the sense that they do their own programming or even write simple macros to gain greater control over their word processing programs.
It is with some trepidation then, that we review Google Hacks. O'Reilly & Associates is well known as the most successful publisher working with truly specialized computing texts. Some of their titles contain fewer English words than strings of letters meaningless to most of us. [1]
Google Hacks, however, is accessible to the non-programmer. At the same time, this book does assume that the reader is willing to sit down at the computer, book in hand, and try a few things.
The value of the work is that, above all, it will make the reader a much more proficient searcher of Internet content. As one who teaches Internet searching skills to history majors, I am well aware that most of us skim along the top of the World Wide Web, mistaking the first ten or so returns from our searches as the material we desire or need.
Of all the search engines, Google is the most interesting one. This is not only because it is the most powerful general engine, and searches not only titles and metadata (those elements embedded in web pages for the purposes of searching and indexing) but also, full text. As such, Google is more than just a search engine; it is in and of itself a sort of social phenomenon. For example, at Interface we continually cite the results of Google searches as indications of the attitudes of those placing content on the web concerning very broad issues. [2] It is an unusual week that there is no story on the major newsletters on the Web on some Google-related phenomenon.
Google has even influenced our language: to look somebody up on the WWW is to "Google" them and to try to influence search rankings by systematically using search engines to raise certain pages above others is "Googlebombing." [3]
For those who prepare web sites, Google is a critical factor. In general, while Google also ranks some paid sites first on many searches (boo!) it thereafter ranks sites in the orders in which they are themselves linked to across the Internet. That is, "PageRank" is, generally speaking, a measure of the number of hyperlinks pointing to a given site on the World Wide Web (p 294). To optimize your site for Google will, however, help a great deal in ensuring that others find your page relatively quickly, and thus that they link to it. Chapter 8 in Google Hacks, "The Webmaster Side of Google," is required reading in our labs.
There are many ways, both licit and illicit, to raise one's PageRank. But Google has the power to de-list a site that it feels is manipulating its search algorithms. The threat of being de-Googled [4] is a very real one. See, for example, the legal notice received at Interface as explained in this month's editorial.
Google is extremely important, and it behooves everybody interested in the World Wide Web to not only understand it, but to become the most sophisticated possible user of it. Google Hacks will accomplish both these goals. We wish that we could say that it will do so painlessly, but that would be an overstatement. We can say that every user of the World Wide Web will find very useful information and can learn very useful skills from it.
Notes:
[1] See their site at: http://www.oreilly.com/
Accessed 3/23/04
[2] See, for example, last month's editorial, "China and the Internet, Part 2: Is China a Threat"?
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2004/01/edit.php
in which we relied upon Google as an index of various attitudes toward China.
Accessed 3/23/04
[3] Perhaps one index of the importance of Google, ironically, is to run a search on Google on the word "google". This returns 42,500,000 hits. "God" returns 60.500,000 hits. We conclude that Google is currently less important than God but probably closing fast, at least in the opinion of those who place web pages or search for them.
[4] Based on my search of this term, which turns up no apparent English language hits (de-Google")
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-
8859-1&q=de-google&btnG=Google+Search
Accessed 3/22/04 I hereby claim credit for the creation of a new Google hyphenate, possibly itself a new phrase.
Melissa Wall - Blogs as black market journalism: A new paradigm for news
Kristina Smolenski-Nelson - Teaching Online: How NOT to get Overwhelmed
Jeffrey Barlow - A Poetic Form for the Internet
Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest's Google Hacks
Ejovi Nuwere and David Chanoff's Hacker Cracker