Google Hacks is a detailed examination of the enormously popular Google search engine. It explains all of the various search syntaxes that are available, and gives reasonable insight into when it is useful to try different variations. It also explores a wide range of tools built on top of Google, or on the Google APIs . I found about half of these to be interesting, and the rest pretty useless. Most of the examples that require programming use the hideous Perl language for the example code. If you aren't a Perl programmer, you will have no hope whatsoever of understanding the code (I programmed in Perl extensively for several years, but haven't used it much since 1999, and I couldn't understand the syntax in the examples). The isolated Python examples are much more readable, but there aren't many of them.

These minor faults aside, the book is worthwhile. Even if you consider yourself a seasoned search-engine jock, you will find useful new techniques in this book, and it's worth your time to check it out.