Overview
Best-selling author and research expert Tara Calishain offers her insider tips and tricks for web searching in this title from Prentice Hall PTR's Garage Series. The book begins with an in-depth look at search engines and other online tools such as browsers. It describes several principles of web searching to help you leverage the scope of the Internet to discover information. The book also covers specific topic areas of Internet searching, both domestically and internationally. Finally, Web Search Garage includes a special technical support section to teach you how to find the support solutions you need on the Internet.
Specific topics covered include
- Search engines
- Browsers
- The principles of web searching
- Searching for news, jobs, and local information
- Finding images and audio on the web
- Searching for people
- Genealogy research
- Consumer help
- Drugs and medical information
- Kid-safe searching
Whether you're a newbie or an Internet search guru, Web Search Garage is a valuable resource for using the Internet wisely to find the information you're looking for. Calishain's thorough explanations and examples, combined with her entertaining wit will help you fine-tune your skills and search the Internet to find convenient solutions.
Synopsis
Writing in a reader-friendly style, Calishain, editor of a weekly newsletter on Internet searching, explains what search engines are for, how to use them, and what tools to use with them to make researching easier. In addition to covering specific topics and showing how to work search engines, she outlines principles for how Internet searching works. Examples provide information on specific kinds of searching, from genealogy to finding local information. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Slashdot.org
The perfect book for the average web user who wants to improve his research skills. I'd put this one in the Christmas stocking for all those people who are getting a new computer or a new broadband connection. That's not to say that the more technical savvy will find nothing in this book, so if you give a copy to someone, either read it first or borrow it back -- you may find it worth enough to get your own copy.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewFind anything. Well, darned near.
Tara Calishain’s Web Search Garage is one of the smartest and most useful web research guides we’ve ever seen. No surprise, perhaps: Calishain’s ResarchBuzz.com is one of the Web’s handiest research resources (even Time magazine’s noticed it).
Calishain starts off with the “elements” of searching: the techniques, gadgets, and tweaks that’ll help you find what you’re looking for faster, with less of the junk you don’t need. Next, the “principles” of searching: approaches that’ll help you figure out where and how to look. (For example, the Principle of the Reinvented Wheel: whatever you’re interested in, chances are there’s a community of people already interested in it. Find the community, and you’ll find the answers.) Calishain’s “Principle of Salt Grains” chapter even helps you decide whether you can trust what you’ve found, based on a few simple questions you can ask about any page or site (or email chain letter!).
Here, too, are the sources, including plenty you might not have known about (like, for example, the Web’s best obituary databases, or where to find great photos of famous 19th-century Americans). And, finally, here are examples: prefabricated searches that are likely to find exactly what you’re looking for.
So what are you looking for? ZIP codes? Audio clips? Your ex-girlfriend? Your state’s Do Not Call registry? Human experts? Song lyrics? Labor statistics? Look here first, and you’re 90 percent there. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2003 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.