The Extreme Searcher s Guide to Web Search Engines: A Handbook for the Serious Searcher

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