Find books in blog?

May 28, 2007 10:29 AM

Blogging anesthesiologist Joe Stirt has a great site, and I particularly like his book recommendations. I'd like to compile a reasonably comprehensive list of these books, but Joe doesn't use tags, so: what is the best way to go about finding his book recommendations amongst all his other posts?
posted by forallmankind to computers & internet (3 comments total)

You could try something like this query on google.

+book +amazon site:http://www.bookofjoe.com/ -inurl:index.html

It limits the search to his site, and eliminates results for index/archive pages which contain multiple posts.
It should only return results that mention both book & amazon (assuming he mentions both in each post).

There is some noise because of other content on the pages, but it's a start.

It would be nice if google let you use CSS selectors to specify where in the DOM terms appeared, though it wouldn't be all that helpful with the markup on templates like that one.
posted by Good Brain at 10:46 AM on May 28, 2007

I see, thanks - is it possible to search the links in a page? So if he, say, makes the title of the book the link and it links to Amazon, then the search returns all links in his site to Amazon?
posted by forallmankind at 1:56 PM on May 28, 2007

I don't know if there is a way to use google to match links on a page, I also don't know that it matters in this case. Look at the search results I linked to. Click on a few. It doesn't look like he generally links to books on amazon, though he does look them up there to get a price.
posted by Good Brain at 9:22 AM on May 29, 2007