Pandia Post No. 23 Part 3

Web Search Garage - a comprehensive introduction to Internet searching

Tara Calishain is one of the most respected Web search experts in the world, so when she publishes a book, searchers pay attention.

(October 16 2004) Her new book, called Web Search Garage, takes a new approach to web search tutorial writing.

This is not primarily an introduction to the ins and outs of the various search engines (although she will tell you how to use them), but a book with a wider scope.

She goes beyond the traditional search engines and tells us about a lot of tools and techniques that will let you harvest the information you need on the World Wide Web.

To give you a few examples: The book includes an excellent chapter on the use of online tools and gadgets, including toolbars, bookmark organizers and browsers. Another one introduces you to the art of using online communities as a source of information, including tips on searching the Usenet.

Regular search engines may be used to find news, jobs, images, lyrics, definitions, old friends and relatives, but there are better tools out there that are fine tuned for this kind of information retrieval.

Did you know about reference-type Web sites like RefDesk, Your Dictionary or Encyclopedia.com? Tara is bound to make your bookmark list a bit longer.

We like this book very much, not only for the fact that she has introduced us to online resources even we at Pandia didn't know about, but for the fact that she gives us such useful hands-on advice on how to use these various tools.

Moreover she also tells you have to make the most out of the regular search engines. For instance: She not only tells you about how to use Boolean search syntax (see our Goalgetter tutorial), she also explains how to use special syntaxes for restricting searches to specific domains, finding inbound links, using shortcuts for financial information and much more.

In Part II of the book, "Principles of Web Searching", Tara tells you what vocabulary to use to target your searches. In her words: " sometimes you'll need to at least be aware of a certain kind of vocabulary even if you're not an expert, in order to be able to do effective searches." This applies to scholarly and scientific terms, but also to nicknames and other synonyms.

This is probably the best book on web searching available today.

Buy this book from Amazon.com
Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
Web Search Garage home page
Tara Calishain's internet site Researchbuzz

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