Searching for something on the internet and need more than the results you find with a quick search on Google or Bing? If so, this could be the book you are looking for. Randolph Hock’s “The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook: A Guide For The Serious Searcher” is touted as the essential guide for anyone using the Internet for research: librarians, teachers, students, writers, business professionals, and others who need to search. web fluently. The book provides strategies and tools (including search engines, portals, and social media) for all major areas of Internet content. The author explains how and when to go beyond the major search engines and offers techniques for using Web 2.0 resources such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and more.
Here’s what’s really great about this book. Hock has organized it very well, so you can easily find what you are looking for, and the book is also written for everyone. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a computer expert to understand this book. In fact, it is written for the non-technical or geek, and for anyone who just wants to use the internet and the web to locate information. Once again, the book is well organized. It begins with a detailed table of contents, then a list of the figures and tables in the book, a foreword, and then an introduction that includes a brief description of the chapters and some tips on how to proceed. There is also a page on the website that accompanies this book that you will probably want to refer to. I am thinking of using it.
The book is divided into ten chapters that focus on the basics for the serious seeker; directories and portals; the basics about search engines; more details about search engines; discussion groups, forums, newsgroups and your family members; an Internet reference shelf; pictures and sounds, or how to find pictures, audio and video; news resources; find products online and your own place on the web, participate and publish. All of these chapters contain many websites and a lot of practical information on how to find what you are looking for. There are so many different places to look for things, and this guide really helps you figure out the best places to look for what you need. On the back, there is a list of all the sites covered in the book, and if you visit the attached website, the links are provided there.
Easy enough for the beginner, but with ideas that even the experts may not know, this book contains the information to turn anyone into an advanced expert in finding things on the Internet, or in other words, an extreme search engine.
