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Tips and tricks for Google geeks

* Users fine-tune a search engine

PARIS 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 US 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.

You can see a full list of all the tips in the book at hacks.oreilly.com/pub/ht/2. Several of them, including the phonebook tip, are available there as a free sample. It’s No. 17. Calishain, the co-author of the book, has more free samples at her Web site, www.researchbuzz.com, an informative site dedicated to search engines and databases on the Web. You can find the Google tools that she has devised at www.buzztoolbox.com/google. Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days.

Another person who has invented tools for Google and put them online is Kevin Shay. One of his programs lets you search Google for terms that are within one, two or three words of each other (www.staggernation.com/cgi-bin/gaps.cgi). That’s Hack #71 in “Google Hacks.” Calishain and Shay were able to develop these useful enhancements using an application programming interface that Google put out last year that lets people make improvements using the computer language Perl. There’s a whole section of “Google Hacks” devoted to this subject, starting with Hack #50, “Introducing the Google Web API.”

The idea of writing your own programs for Google may give you pause, but Calishain says that it’s not hard. “When the Google API came out in April 2002, I was not a big Perl programmer,” she said by phone from her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I knew just enough to say ‘Hello, world,’ and that was about it. I downloaded the API documentation, and I got so excited by the date-range syntax that I spent the weekend creating Goofresh.”

Coincidentally, as I was exploring the world of APIs, a recent paper came to my attention that described a chilling “Internet-based attack on the physical world” that could wreak havoc. It would use software “robots” on the Internet to automatically fill in thousands or millions of forms, which could create a kind of denial-of-service attack in the real world. (The paper is available at avirubin.com/scripted.attacks.pdf.) As an example of what they have in mind, the authors, Simon Byers and David Kormann of AT&T Labs and Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, outline an attack that would overwhelm the US Postal Service and bring it to a halt.

The basic idea is that you could use Google to find catalogue-request forms and then write a Perl script that would enter somebody’s name and address in, perhaps, a quarter of a million such forms. The authors say they conceived of this kind of attack in September 2000 but decided not to publish it in order not to give anyone any ideas. But, they say, “the recent availability of an Application Programming Interface for search engines makes the attack much more likely.” Calishain acknowledged the potential problem. He pointed to several ways that Google could limit the number of requests made by an API or other automatic trick. But Rubin, one of the authors of the paper, was not impressed. “The attack we describe is a whole lot more obvious with the existence of search engine APIs,” he said in an e-mail. —IHT.com

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