The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook: A Guide for the Serious Searcher Review

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(More customer reviews)As the author points out in this book's introduction, Internet searching gets more difficult as the number of Web pages on the Internet increases. Finding what you want isn't simply a matter of entering the right keywords in a search engine. You need to know how to search and which search engine will work best for you. You need to know where to start on the Internet if the information you are searching for can be found without using a search engine or is found on what the author calls "the invisible Web," the part of the Internet that hasn't been mapped and indexed by search engines.
"The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook" is a practical-advice guide to Internet searching. The author looks at Web directories and search engines and tells you where to start when you are doing different kinds of research. There is also advice for conducting research in newsgroups and mailing lists, as well as a catalogue of online references such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. A chapter on news sources and online shopping Web sites rounds out the book.
If you are patient, you can get a lot of good advice from this book. I discovered, for example, that one search engine, AltaVista, permits "NEAR" searches for keywords within ten words of one another on Web pages. I didn't know this kind of search was available. I also discovered a handful of excellent directories and Web sites for conducting Internet research.
However, this book doesn't serve well as a reference. The headings are not particularly descriptive, which makes finding information difficult. The author does a good job of explaining each search engine's features, but the features are presented in long bulleted lists, which makes it hard to compare the search engines. A table in Chapter 4 attempts to compare different search engines, but the table is so crowded with data, it is nearly impossible to read or understand.
The author rightfully points out that Internet researchers often neglect newsgroups and mailing lists in their research, but his instructions for searching for newsgroups with Google are out of date and he doesn't explain how to use Outlook Express or another newsgroup reader to subscribe to newsgroups. Worse, he lumps Yahoo! groups in with newsgroups, when really the two are quite different, as Yahoo! groups are held privately by Yahoo! members (and for that matter, the author might have considered explaining how to create a Yahoo! group on your own). Only three pages are devoted to mailing lists. I think this topic could've used more attention.
The author obviously knows his stuff and is passionate about helping others conduct research on the Internet. I just wish this book was organized more carefully and was professionally published. As another reviewer noted, a graphic image (of a leaf?) obscures the page numbers. That is unforgivable in a reference book like this one, where you often have to consult the index and turn to a particular page. I got angry more than once at not being able to tell which page I was looking at.

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A guide for anyone who makes use of the Internet for research, including librarians, teachers, students, business researchers, and writers, this book details what serious users have to know to fully take advantage of Internet search tools and resources. Newsgroups, image resources, and reference resources are covered, as are the major tools-search engines, directories, and portals-and strategies needed to access these resources. For those with little to moderate searching experience, friendly, easy-to-follow guidelines to the world of Internet research are provided. For experienced searchers, new perspectives on content and techniques are discussed.