Google Hacks

Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Tim Allwine is a Senior Software Engineer at O’Reilly & Associates. 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.

• Paul Bausch (http://www.onfocus.com/) is a freelance web developer and author living in Oregon. He was a co-creator of the weblog software, Blogger, and recently co-wrote a book about weblogs called We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. He believes (like Google) that “love” (75,700,000) will conquer “hate” (7,900,000).

• Erik Benson (http://www.erikbenson.com/).

• 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 to 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).

• 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 using an Intel XScale). In his non-computer time, Andrew is trying to organize a wedding having just got engaged!

• Andrew Goodman (http://www.page-zero.com) is cofounder and editor of Traffick.com, an acclaimed guide to search engines and portals. Traffick foresaw trends such as the rise of pay-per-click search engines well before they were adopted by the mainstream. Goodman has published articles in publications such as Internet Markets, The Globe and Mail, and Yorkshire Post Magazine. He is often cited in various business and technology publications, and he often speaks at conferences such as Search Engine Strategies.

• 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.” Publisher, developer, and writer of more home cooking than you could ever imagine (like the popular open sourced syndicated reader AmphetaDesk, the best-kept gaming secret Gamegrene.com, the popular Ghost Sites and Nonsense Network, the giggle-inducing articles at the O’Reilly Network, a few pieces at Apple’s Internet Developer site, etc.), he’s 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, NH.

• 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, UK, specializing in search engine-friendly design.

• Judy Hourihan (http://judy.hourihan.com/).

• Steven Johnson (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/) is the author of two books, Emergence and Interface Culture. He co-created 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.

• Stuart Langridge (http://www.kryogenix.org/) gets paid to hack on the Web during the day, and does it for free at nights 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 weblog. 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 consulting information architect and PHP developer, who is heavily interested in movements such as an increase in online strategy and planning, the REST philosophy, and open source development. Beau has a self-taught background in web technologies and currently works in a clicks ‘n’ mortar company based out of Perth, Western Australia, and runs his own consultancy at the same time. He firmly believes in making complex systems easy to use and simple to understand, and makes this a primary objective in all of his projects. More information about Beau and what he’s up to is available on his web site, the home of his consulting company, Dented Reality, as well as a number of musings and observations on the web industry and technology in general.

• Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) is the author of Dive Into Python, a free Python book for experienced programmers, and Dive Into Accessibility, a free book on web accessibility techniques. He works for MassLight, a Washington DC-based training and web development company, where, unsurprisingly, he does training and web development. But he lives outside Raleigh, North Carolina, because it’s warmer.

• 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 in general, makes a pest of himself at Microsoft design reviews.

• Alex Shapiro (http://www.touchgraph.com/) is the founder and CTO of TouchGraph LLC. Alex’s experience with TouchGraph is paralleled by that of the dotcom survivors described in Newsweek’s March 25, 2002 “Welcome Back to Silicon Valley” cover story. When faced with a shrinking technology market, he too decided to take the opportunity to innovate rather than struggling to find generic employment. On January 15, 2001, Alex quit his first job at Sapient, NYC, ahead of the first round of layoffs. Luckily, he was able to find work as an independent consult designing software for a brand valuation firm. His free time was spent polishing off the graph visualization code at the heart of TouchGraph. In May 2002, Alex passed the brand valuation client to a friend and started working on TouchGraph full time. Since then, things have been very exciting due to the growing popularity and public acclaim for the software. TouchGraph has yet to get first-round funding.

• 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 had intended to be doing research for UnBlinking (http://www.unblinking.com/). When Gary writes for UnBlinking, he might better be focused 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 unusual flora and fauna on 160 acres of woods and wetland he owns, which in turn, keeps him from spending time with his wife (and Nexcerpt CEO) Julie, whom he married to offset his former all-consuming career as an above-top-secret computer spy, which he first had entered to avoid permanently becoming a jazz arranger and pianist. Seriously.

• 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. Tabke has been involved in computing since the late 70s and is one of the Internet’s foremost authorities on search engine optimization.

• Matt Webb (http://interconnected.org/home/) is a systems engineer at UpMyStreet.com, specializing in developing UK Government and Public Sector local information sites. Outside of work, he’s developed several IM bots (including Googlematic), Dirk (a vast collaborative net of associations), and runs and writes for Upsideclown.com, which publishes short fiction and creative writing and has spawned a book. He is best known for Interconnected, a weblog on society and technology. He lives in London.