Rael Dornfest is Chief Technology Officer at O’Reilly Media. He assesses, experiments, programs, fiddles, fidgets, and writes for the O’Reilly Network and various O’Reilly publications. Rael is Series Editor of the O’Reilly Hacks series (http://hacks.oreilly.com) and has edited, contributed to, and coauthored various O’Reilly books, including Mac OS X Panther Hacks, Mac OS X Hacks, Google Pocket Guide, Google: The Missing Manual, Essential Blogging, and Peer to Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. He is also Program Chair for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (http://conferences.oreilly.com/etech). In his copious free time, Rael develops bits and bobs of freeware, particularly the Blosxom weblog application (http://www.blosxom.com), and (more often than not) maintains his Raelity Bytes blog (http://www.raelity.org).
Paul Bausch is an independent web developer living in Corvallis, Oregon. When he’s not hacking together web applications, he’s writing about hacking together web applications. He put together Amazon Hacks for O’Reilly in 2003, Yahoo! Hacks in 2005, and coauthored Flickr Hacks in 2005. Paul also helped create the popular weblog application Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), and maintains a directory of Oregon weblogs called ORblogs (http://www.orblogs.com). When he’s not working on a book, Paul posts thoughts and photos to his personal blog onfocus (http://www.onfocus.com).
Tara Calishain is the editor of ResearchBuzz (http://www.researchbuzz.com), a weekly newsletter on Internet searching and online information resources. She’s also a regular columnist for Searcher magazine. She’s been writing about search engines and searching since 1996; her most recent book is Web Search Garage (Prentice Hall PTR).
The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:
DJ Adams (http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro) is an SAP hacker who pines for the days when he wrote job control language and S/370 assembler and got around central London on his skateboard. Currently, he is knee-deep in NetWeaver technologies and uses up spare brain cycles playing with REST, RDF, and Jabber. He wrote O’Reilly’s Programming Jabber: Extending XML Messaging and co-wrote Google Pocket Guide, also from O’Reilly. He lives in Europe with Sabine and Joseph.
Doug Adams is the webmaster of “Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes” (http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes), a web site that offers free AppleScripts for iTunes and resources for people who write them. The site was started in late 2001 and originally offered AppleScripts for SoundJam MP, the wicked cool MP3 player for Macintosh computers that was acquired by Apple and that eventually evolved into iTunes. Doug has been working with AppleScript since its debut during the days of System 7, but he has been programming anything that moves since buying a mail order Commodore 64 in 1983. In addition to the iTunes AppleScripts site, he maintains the “AppleScripts for Tex-Edit Plus Archives” (http://www.malcolmadams.com/te/). Doug lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife Natalie and daughter Ellen. When he’s not AppleScripting (which, believe it or not, is most of the time), Doug is a freelance audio producer and commercial voiceover announcer.
Tim Allwine is a Senior Software Engineer at O’Reilly Media. He develops software for the Market Research group—various spidering tools that collect data from disparate sites—and is involved in the development of web services at O’Reilly.
AvaQuest (http://www.avaquest.com) is a Massachusetts-based IT services firm that specializes in applying advanced information retrieval, categorization, and text-mining technologies to solve real-world problems. GooglePeople and GoogleMovies, created by AvaQuest consultants Nathan Treloar, Sally Kleinfeldt, and Peter Richards, came out of a web-mining consulting project the team worked on in the summer of 2002, shortly after the Google Web API was announced.
Erik Benson (http://www.erikbenson.com).
Justin Blanton (http://justinblanton.com) has a B.S. in computer engineering and is currently attending law school in Silicon Valley, where he is focusing on intellectual property law, and will likely practice both patent prosecution and litigation. Much of his “free time” is spent writing about various things on his web site, including Mac OS X, mobile phones and other gadgets, general tips and tricks for the Movable Type CMS, and life in general.
CapeScience.com (http://www.capescience.com) is the development community for Cape Clear Software, a web services company. In addition to providing support for Cape Clear’s products, CapeScience makes all sorts of fun web services stuff, including live services, clients for other services, utilities, and other geekware.
Antoni Chan (http://www.alltooflat.com) is one of the founders of All Too Flat, a bastion of quirky content, pranks, and geeky humor. The Google Mirror is a 2,500-line CGI script that was developed over the period of a year starting in October 2001. When not working on his web site, he enjoys playing music, bowling, and running after a Frisbee.
Tanya Harvey Ciampi (http://www.multilingual.ch) grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, and went on to study in Zurich, where she obtained her diploma in translation. She now lives in Ticino, the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, where she works as an English technical translator (from Italian, German, and French) and proofreader, and teaches translation and Internet search techniques based on her WWW Search Interfaces for Translators. In her free time, she enjoys fishing with her father on the west coast of Ireland, writing poems, and playing Celtic music.
Peter Drayton (http://www.razorsoft.net/weblog/) is a program manager in the CLR team at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, he was an independent consultant, trainer for DevelopMentor, and author of C# Essentials and C# in a Nutshell (O’Reilly).
Schuyler Erle is a linguist by training and a Free Software developer by vocation. He got into GIS and digital cartography with Rich several years ago, while trying to analyze the best lines-of-sight for a rural wireless community network. He actually believes that maps and GIS, properly applied, can tell compelling stories and help improve people’s lives. As of this writing, he lives with his wife near 42.375 N, 71.106 W.
Andrew Flegg (http://www.bleb.org) works for IBM in the UK, having graduated from the University of Warwick a few years ago. He’s currently the webmaster of Hursley Lab’s intranet site. Most of his work (and fun) at the moment is taken up with Perl, Java, HTML, and CSS. Andrew is particularly keen on clean, reusable code, which always ends up saving time in the long run. He’s written several open source projects, as well as a couple of commercial applications for RISC OS (as used in the Iyonix PC, the first desktop computer to use an Intel XScale).
Rich Gibson believes that the world is made of stories, and has unlimited curiosity in the world. He indulges his brilliant, semi-manic children in super-long storytimes, weird science projects, and adventures of many varieties. It is only the steady support of his loving wife that permits him to organize his eccentricity into occasional coherent bursts of creative productivity. Life is very, very good.
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media (http://www.page-zero.com), a Toronto-based search-marketing firm. He is the author of Winning Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill), and recently edited Mona Elesseily’s Yahoo Search Marketing Handbook. He has a high Quality Score, and a higher golf handicap.
Kevin Hemenway (http://www.disobey.com), better known as Morbus Iff, is the creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as “content for the discontented.” He’s a publisher, developer, and writer of more home cooking than you could possibly imagine (like the popular open source syndicated reader AmphetaDesk, the best-kept gaming secret Gamegrene.com, the popular Ghost Sites and Nonsense Network, the giggle-inducing articles on the O’Reilly Network, a few pieces at Apple’s Internet Developer site, etc.), and an ardent supporter of cloning merely so he can get more work done. He cooks with a Fry Pan of Intellect +2 and lives in Concord, New Hampshire.
Jack D. Herrington is a programmer who has been developing applications since he was 13, almost 25 years ago. Over the years, he has written in every major programming language and for every environment.
Mark Horrell (http://www.markhorrell.com) has worked in search engine optimization since 1996 when he joined Net Resources International, a publisher of industrial-engineering web sites, where he conceived and developed the company’s Internet marketing strategy. He left in 2002 and is now a freelance web developer based in London, specializing in search engine–friendly design.
Judy Hourihan (http://judy.hourihan.com).
Leland Johnson (http://protoplasmic.org) is currently a student at Illinois Institute of Technology. He tried learning Perl in 1999, then tried again and was successful in 2001, and now uses it for everything except his classes. When he’s not busy with classes, he updates his blog, explores Chicago, and plays far too many video games.
Steven Johnson (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/) is the author of two books, Emergence (Scribner) and Interface Culture (Perseus). He cocreated the sites FEED and Plastic.com, and now blogs regularly at http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com. He writes the monthly “Emerging Technology” column for Discover magazine, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Harper’s, Wired, and The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Richard Jones (http://richard.jones.name) has spent the last four years working as a software engineer for Agent Oriented Software (http://www.agent-software.com). AOS is responsible for a leading intelligent-agent development platform known as JACK Intelligent Agents. Before AOS, he worked as a software engineer for Senate Software (a small search technology company), where he developed web page relevance heuristics. Before that, Richard was a co-founder of Earthmen Technology, which developed network intrusion detection technologies. At Earthman, he was responsible for a majority of the development, which included low-level TCP/IP networking code, Linux kernel hacking, and fast pattern-matching algorithms. He has two degrees, one in computer science and another in cognitive science, both from LaTrobe University (http://www.latrobe.edu.au). While in school, Richard majored in computer science, linguistics, and psychology—areas he retains a keen interest in. Richard is also a squash-playing Buddhist.
Stuart Langridge (http://www.kryogenix.org) gets paid to hack on the Web during the day, and does it for free at night when he’s not arguing about Buffy or Debian GNU/Linux. He’s keen on web standards, Python, and strange things you can do with JavaScript, all of which can be seen at his web site and blog. He’s also slightly surprised that the Google Art Creator, which was an amusing little hack done in a day, is the most popular thing he’s ever written and got him into a book.
Beau Lebens (http://www.dentedreality.com.au) is a PHP web developer who believes that even complex systems can be made simple for an end user. Originally from Perth, Western Australia, he is currently working in Hawaii. He has released a number of projects on his web site, including webpad, the web-based text editor; AvantBlog, a Palm/Pocket PC Blogging application; and the PHP Blogger API, which provides PHP developers with access to the Blogger API. Beau is a big believer in simpler, distributed technologies such as Atom, REST, and RSS for the future of the Web.
Philipp Lenssen (http://blog.outer-court.com) was born in 1977 and currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany. He works as a developer for the web sites of a popular German car-maker. He once spent nine months living in Malaysia and prefers very spicy foods. In his spare time, Philipp is the author of Google Blogoscoped (a daily blog covering Google, online research, and Internet fun in general) and searches for new and exciting ways to tap the consciousness of the Web.
Mark Lyon (http://marklyon.org) is the creator of the Google Gmail Loader. A former programmer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he gave up his aspirations of programming greatness after an unsuccessful interview at Google. He is now a law student at Mississippi College in Jackson and plans to practice intellectual property and technology law. In his spare time, he writes novel but mediocre software in whatever language strikes his fancy.
Mikel Maron (http://brainoff.com/) is an independent software developer and ecologist. He has built several geographically oriented projects around the worldKit mapping package, including World as a Blog and mapufacture. Previously, he led the development of My Yahoo! in the pre-RSS days. Mikel was awarded a master’s degree from the University of Sussex for building a simulation of the evolution of complexity in food webs. Originally from California, Mikel is now based mostly in Brighton, UK, with his wife Anna. Links to various things can be found at his web site.
Paul Mutton (http://www.jibble.org) currently works for Netcraft in the UK. He graduated with first-class honors in computer science, winning the IEE Institution Prize for being the best overall student in his department. He uses Google on a daily basis and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to collaborate with fellow Ph.D. students in other countries. In his spare time, he uses his Sun Certified Java Programmer skills to develop all sorts of open source software on his personal web site (http://www.jibble.org). Some of his research has culminated in the creation of the popular PieSpy application (http://www.jibble.org/piespy), which infers and visualizes social networks on IRC, and even appeared on Slashdot once. He can normally be found jibbling around in #jibble and #irchacks on the freenode IRC network with the nickname Jibbler, or Paul on smaller networks.
Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org), author of Greasmonkey Hacks (O’Reilly), is an accessibility architect by day. By night, he is a husband and father who lives in North Carolina with his wife, his two sons, and his dog. He spends his copious free time sunbathing, skydiving, and reading Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason in the original Klingon.
Andrew Savikas works in the O’Reilly Digital Media Group. Andrew is the author of Word Hacks, also published by O’Reilly. He developed and maintains the custom Word template and VBA macros used by all the O’Reilly authors who don’t insist on writing in POD. Except for the ones who insist on writing in XML. Or Troff. Andrew also works with FrameMaker, FrameScript, InDesign, DocBook XML, Perl, Python, Ruby, and whatever else he finds lying around the office. He has a degree in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and lives in Boston with his wife Audrey, who loves to see her name in print.
Chris Sells (http://www.sellsbrothers.com) is an independent consultant, speaker, and author specializing in distributed applications in .NET and COM. He’s written several books and is currently working on Windows Forms for C# and VB.NET Programmers and Mastering Visual Studio .NET. In his free time, Chris hosts various conferences, directs the Genghis source-available project, plays with Rotor, and makes a pest of himself in general at Microsoft design reviews.
Alex Shapiro (http://www.touchgraph.com) is the founder and CTO of TouchGraph LLC. Alex graduated from Columbia’s computer science program in 2000 and spent his early career at a consulting company. After the stock-market bubble burst, he decided to spend time developing a network visualization product he had conceived. Through network visualization, Alex found that he could combine his interests in user interface design, graph theory, and sociology. After seeing a business demand for his technology, Alex founded TouchGraph LLC, which is slowly gathering a list of respected clients.
Kevin Shay (http://www.staggernation.com) is a writer and web programmer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His Google API scripts, Movable Type plug-ins, and other work can be found at the soon-to-launch staggernation.com.
Gary Stock (http://www.googlewhack.com/stock.htm) coined the term “Google whack” while he was supposed to be doing research for UnBlinking (http://www.unblinking.com). When Gary writes for UnBlinking, he would do better to focus on his role as CTO of the news-clipping and briefing service Nexcerpt (http://www.nexcerpt.com). Gary works at Nexcerpt to get a break from stewardship of the unusual flora and fauna on the 160 acres of woods and wetland that he owns, which in turn keeps him from spending time with his wife (and Nexcerpt CEO) Julie, who he married to offset his former all-consuming career as an above-top-secret computer spy, which he had entered to avoid permanently becoming a jazz arranger and pianist. Seriously.
Aaron Swartz (http://www.aaronsw.com) is a teenage writer, coder, and hacker. He is a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, a member of the W3C RDF Core Working Group, and metadata adviser to the Creative Commons. He’s also the guy behind the Google Weblog (http://google.blogspace.com). He can be reached at me@aaronsw.com.
Brett Tabke (http://www.webmasterworld.com) is the owner/operator of WebmasterWorld.com, the leading news and discussion site for web developers and search engine marketers. Brett has been involved in computing since the late 1970s and is one of the Internet’s foremost authorities on search engine optimization.
Adam Trachtenberg (http://www.trachtenberg.com) is Manager of Technical Evangelism at eBay, where he preaches the gospel of the eBay platform to developers and businessmen around the globe. Before eBay, Adam co-founded and served as Vice President for Development at two companies, Student.Com and TVGrid.Com. At both firms, he led front- and middle-end web site design and development. Adam began using PHP in 1997 and is the author of Upgrading to PHP 5 and co-author of PHP Cookbook, both published by O’Reilly. He lives in San Francisco and has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Columbia University.
Phillip M. Torrone is a feature columnist for http://www.engadget.com and a contributing editor for Popular Science. Coauthor of Flash Enabled: Design and Development for Mobile Devices (New Riders), Phillip has also contributed to numerous books and magazines on hardware hacking, cell phones, and PDAs. Phillip’s latest work and more can be found at http://www.flashenabled.com.
Matt Webb is an engineer and designer, splitting his working life between R&D with BBC Radio & Music Interactive and freelance projects (primarily in the social-software world), most recently co-authoring Mind Hacks for O’Reilly. Online, he can be found at Interconnected (http://interconnected.org/home) and, in the real world, in London.
We would like to thank all those who contributed their ideas and code for Google hacks to this book. Many thanks to Nelson Minar and the rest of the Google Engineering Team, Nate Tyler, and everyone else at Google who provided ideas, suggestions, and answers—not to mention the Google Web API itself. And to Andy Lester and Justin Blanton, our technical editors along the way, goes much appreciation for their thorough nitpicking.
First and foremost, to Asha, Sam, and Mira—always my inspiration, joy, and best friends.
My extended family and friends, both local and virtual, who’d begun to wonder if they needed to send in a rescue party.
Brian Sawyer has, over the course of the last year, been my production liaison, co-editor, editor, “man Friday,” and friend. Hat’s off ;-) to Brian, and long may he stet.
I’d like to thank Dale Dougherty for bringing me in to work on the Hacks series; it’s been a circle of wide circumference from Google Hacks to Google Hacks, Third Edition, and quite the journey of discovery. The O’Reilly editors, production, product management, and marketing staff are consummate professionals, hackers, and mensches. Extra special thanks goes out to my virtual cube-mate, Nat Torkington; to Laurie Petrycki for showing me the ropes; and to Tim O’Reilly for his unfailing support and friendship.
Tara, it’s been fabulous traveling this road with you, and I intend to make sure our paths keep on crossing at interesting intersections.
Karma points to Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson for egging me on to do more with the Google API than late-night fiddling. And, of course, a shout-out goes to the blogosphere population and folks in my Google neighborhood for their inspired prattling on APIs and all other things geek-worthy.
To my wife Shawnde, thanks again for the continuous feedback, frontline editing, and for cheerfully discussing Google day and night.
Many thanks go to Brian Sawyer for providing direction and encouragement, and for fine-tuning the text.
Thanks to Rael and Tara for blazing the hacks trail, and to Rael for inspiring me to get involved with the Hacks series in the first place.
And thanks to my friends both online and off for chewing on hack ideas and sending those one or two bits of info that make a hack work.
Everyone at O’Reilly has been great in helping pull this book together, but I wouldn’t have gotten to participate in this book if it hadn’t been for Tim Allwine, who first helped me with Perl programs a couple of years ago.
My family, especially my husband, has been great about tolerating my distraction as I sat around muttering to myself about variables and subroutines.
Even as this book was being written, I needed help understanding what Perl could and couldn’t do. Kevin Hemenway was an excellent teacher, patiently explaining, providing examples, and, when all else failed, pointing and laughing at my code.
Of course, most of this book wouldn’t exist without the release of Google’s API. A big thanks to Google for building a playground for us thousands of search-engine junkies. And just as big a thanks to the many contributors who so generously allowed their applications to appear in this book.
Finally, a big, big, he-gets-his-own-paragraph thanks to Rael Dornfest, who is a great co-author/editor and a lot of fun to work with.
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