Comments on: Find books in blog?

Question: Find books in blog?

forallmankind — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:29:16 -0800

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?

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:46:46 -0800

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.

By: forallmankind

forallmankind — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:56:03 -0800

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?

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:22:38 -0800

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.