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This book is easy to read and very helpful. It is great for novices and experienced web users. It lists resources and easy tips. Definately worth buying.
I have been using the internet for many years, but this book taught me things that I didn't know. Using the links on the book website enabled me to quickly go to pages and learn as I read. It's really a great tool for students learning to do research papers.
I bought this book as a textbook for an Electronic Information Retrieval course at school. I have found that this is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn how to get more out of their Internet and Database searches. This is a must have for anyone needing to do research.
This resource should be on every serious searcher's shelf next to Chris Sherman's book(s)and Find It Online. Gary Price updates his website to supplement the chapters in the written book, which is very helpful. Price takes a slightly different approach to Sherman, which helps to find resources which might not be self-apparent from Sherman's books. I can't imagine being without either this tool or those of Price's colleague (Sherman).
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. 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newsgroups and mailing lists in their research, but his instructions for searching for newsgroups with Google are out of date and he doesn't explain how to use Outlook Express or another newsgroup reader to subscribe to newsgroups. The author looks at Web directories and search engines and tells you where to start when you are doing different kinds of research. You need to know how to search and which search engine will work best for you.
group on your own). 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. Finding what you want isn't simply a matter of entering the right keywords in a search engine. I discovered, for example, that one search engine, AltaVista, permits "NEAR" searches for keywords within ten words of one another on Web pages. Worse, he lumps Yahoo.
members (and for that matter, the author might have considered explaining how to create a Yahoo. 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. I didn't know this kind of search was available. As another reviewer noted, a graphic image (of a leaf).
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. groups in with newsgroups, when really the two are quite different, as Yahoo. groups are held privately by Yahoo. Only three pages are devoted to mailing lists. The headings are not particularly descriptive, which makes finding information difficult. obscures the page numbers. 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.
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 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 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. I just wish this book was organized more carefully and was professionally published. I got angry more than once at not being able to tell which page I was looking at.
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