Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's easy to be suspicious of a book about how to use search engines. After all, search engines are designed to be simple to use: You just type in your keywords and go. Web Search Garage takes over at the far end of what is obvious, where author Tara Calishain explains how to use little-known search engines (particularly specialized ones) and unadvertised features of more famous search tools (mainly Google and Yahoo). She also describes some clever hacks that are engine independent, such as the fact that U.S. states have official URLs ending with their postal abbreviation and .us, as in .wa.us for the state of Washington. You can narrow searches usefully with that bit of knowledge. To cite another example, you can use the idea of combining Google's wildcard capability with its exact-match search capability in queries like, "there are * types of horse" to yield reasonable-sized lists of useful hits.
The hints and ideas are thick in this modest-sized book, and they're consistently outside the realm of what most of us would figure out for ourselves. In browsing this book, you'll issue mental "Ah!" exclamations fairly frequently, and you'll find yourself motivated to store Web Search Garage near the place where you do most of your browsing. After it first saves you some time, you'll be reaching for it frequently to get its advice. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to find the Web pages and information you want using Google, Yahoo, and other online search resources. Search syntax, keyword selection, and little-known features of search engines all get attention.
Book Description
Preface In the last ten years or so I ve been fascinated with the Web. And since the Web started getting large enough to require organization, I ve been fascinated with how that organization has evolved. From very basic text pages and Big Red Buttons That Don t Do Anything, we ve moved to extensive databases, search engines, and online information collections of all sorts. Since I wrote the Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research in 1996, the landscape has changed dramatically. In 1996 it was possible to maintain a "big picture" idea of resources available online: even if you couldn t track down every last one you had a sense of what was available, where the gaps were, and so on. Now that s impossible. The Internet is growing too quickly. But hey, these are the kinds of problems you want to have, right? A rapidly growing collection of information, with a rapidly growing set of tools for dealing with it. In 1996 I decided I was crazy about search engines. I loved experimenting with them, learning the syntaxes, trying to figure out how to make them work best. I m still crazy about them. I m almost as crazy about trying to teach other people to use the search engines, to help them take advantage of the wealth of information that s appearing online. Thanks for buying this book. If you, too, get bitten by the search engine bug, join me over at ResearchBuzz.com. There I ll try to keep you up to date with developments in the search engine world. Thanks for reading.
Web Search Garage
Web Search Garage,Tara Calishain,Prentice Hall PTR,0131471481,Computer Bks - Other Applications,Computer Books: General,Computers,E-Commerce - Internet Marketing,General,Internet - World Wide Web,Internet addresses,Internet searching,Search engines,Web search engines,Web sites,Computers / Internet / World Wide Web
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