Tips & tricks for Google geeks

April 21, 2003

You no doubt use Google to search the Web. Everybody does. But you probably don't know all of the things that Google can do, and you may not know that you can create your own programs to improve Google's already impressive searching power.

Did you know, for example, that you can use Google as a U.S. telephone directory? To start, all you need to know is the person's last name and state. Type "phonebook:" followed by the last name and two-letter state abbreviation in the Google search field. (The search returns a maximum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly common, you'll have to help it out by providing a city or a first name.)

If you type rphonebook:, you will get only residential listings. If you type bphonebook:, you'll get only business listings. (Don't leave out the colon after “phonebook.”) You can even use this feature as a reverse directory. Type phonebook: (area code) (number), and Google will (usually) give you the name of the person who has that number.

I recently learned this trick from a new book, "Google Hacks," by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, which is published by O'Reilly and lists for $24.95, or £17.50 in Britain.

Computer books from O'Reilly usually demand a fair amount of technical knowledge. But this one is an exception. Its subtitle is "100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools," and while all 100 of them aren't as useful or as easy as the phonebook example, many of them are. Did you know that there are special syntaxes you can use to narrow your Google search? If you're researching an academic subject, type site: edu into the search window, and you'll restrict your hits to .edu sites - colleges and universities. It is also possible to search Google for a particular file type, such as a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe Acrobat file.

Google also has a built-in dictionary. After you've done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an underlined word, and Google will give you its definition. Another click activates a thesaurus. Another useful enhancement to Google, which Calishain said came too late to be included in the book, is Google Alert (www.google alert.com). You enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.

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