The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines

By James Scott Bell

Book Overview

Everyone knows how to call up a search site, tap in some keywords, and hope for something relevant. But to get valuable and speedy results from Web search engines, you need some advanced knowledge. The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines tells you what you need to know. This book shows you how to assemble high-quality queries on major search sites. In addition to providing a general tutorial on composing Boolean searches--that's all the AND, OR, and NOT stuff--Randolph Hock shows you how to use each site's special search terms and characters. He explains how to do proximity searches on Lycos, for example, and how to limit a HotBot search to information no more than a week old. If you're publishing information on a Web site and want to increase its chances of coming up in search results, be sure to check out Hock's information on how documents get pulled into the engines' databases and how they're indexed. Documented sites include AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Yahoo, and others. Hock doesn't pay enough attention to searches for nontext media--a search for MP3 files and clip art would have been helpful. Coverage of non-U.S. search tools is lacking as well. But what's here satisfies most needs. --David Wall This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0310243882
• ISBN13: 9780310243885
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Makes Finding Information Online a Much Easier Task!

The availability of a lot of information on the Internet has made finding specific information a more difficult task to accomplish. Unless someone knows were to find something online they must make use of existing tools to find it. A number of elaborate search engine tools were created with this one goal in mind. Randolph Hock has written The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines to provide us with helpful...

If you search the Net, you need this book

It's always hard to figure out which search engine to use when you're trying to find information on the Web. Hock's book does a great job at sorting out the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major search engines, as well as providing easy-to-read documentation of features such as phrase searching and searching for personal names. I especially liked the sections on "What Happens Behind the Scenes" and "Special Options,"...