Editorial Reviews:
Enter your Web Search Garage where you learn how to look, what to use to find magic find it faster with less junk, less hassle even figure out what it means (or doesn't). Where you find the answers Where you learn how to ask the questions Your mentor, teacher, Web search magician: Tara Calishain author of Google Hacks, host of ResearchBuzz.com can help you find anything that exists (and some things that don't) including lost buddies, buried ancestors sounds and pictures, great deals, honest advice, intriguing quackery, term paper research, news you can use, jobs and love (maybe both at once) Browse it, take it home, Enter the Garage Come out, a master
It's easy to be suspicious of a book about how to use search engines. After all, search engines are designed to be simple to use: You just type in your keywords and go. Web Search Garage takes over at the far end of what is obvious, where author Tara Calishain explains how to use little-known search engines (particularly specialized ones) and unadvertised features of more famous search tools (mainly Google and Yahoo). She also describes some clever hacks that are engine independent, such as the fact that U.S. states have official URLs ending with their postal abbreviation and .us, as in .wa.us for the state of Washington. You can narrow searches usefully with that bit of knowledge. To cite another example, you can use the idea of combining Google's wildcard capability with its exact-match search capability in queries like, "there are * types of horse" to yield reasonable-sized lists of useful hits. The hints and ideas are thick in this modest-sized book, and they're consistently outside the realm of what most of us would figure out for ourselves. In browsing this book, you'll issue mental "Ah!" exclamations fairly frequently, and you'll find yourself motivated to store Web Search Garage near the place where you do most of your browsing. After it first saves you some time, you'll be reaching for it frequently to get its advice. --David Wall Topics covered: How to find the Web pages and information you want using Google, Yahoo, and other online search resources. Search syntax, keyword selection, and little-known features of search engines all get attention.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 13 total reviews (Page 1 of 3):
 Didn't Make Me A Better Web Searcher
I bought this book reading the reviews on Amazon.com. When I got it, I was sorely disappointed. The author has a bit of an arrogance about her which comes through in the pages, which is fine, but then the book doesn't teach any good tricks...so the arrogance becomes a little annoying. To be honest, I thumbed through it four times after receiving it from Amazon and I didn't find any good info it (i.e. nothing about it really grabbed me) and I haven't looked at it since - so take my review for whats it worth. Ultimately, It did not help me in my goal: to be a better web searcher. My advice is to just look online for web search tricks. You'll find specifically what you are looking for and it will be free. The author promises a lot - but does not deliver.  More about searching the web from a good author
As someone who lives on the wrong side of the world from the best sources of information and shopping I seem to spend a large amount of time online, and a large part of that in a search engine. Web Search Garage promises to let me `Find it faster with less junk, less hassle.'
For experienced net researchers and the search-engine savvy among us, the book may well not live up to the promise, though for a large number of `net users out there it may be just the thing. Where Calishain's previous book, Google Hacks, covered one search engine in great depth in a fairly technical way, this book covers the entire topic of web research in a more friendly manner and language, leaving out the more technical topics of APIs and programming interfaces to spend more time covering advanced search syntaxes and off-the-beaten path search engines and directories.
Calishain has for quite a while written well-researched, informative articles on search engines and research for her weekly newsletter and website ResearchBuzz and the time she has spent on the topic and writing experience have informed this volume. She starts out with the absolute basics, the difference between a search engine (Google) and a searchable subject index (Yahoo) before going on to cover how to get the best out of each.
The book also covers a wide range of search related topics such as finding jobs, local information, multimedia or information about people and Genealogy. Almanacs, dictionaries and encyclopedia get covered. It's hard to think of something missing. Calishain has also taken a great deal of care with her topics. In the section on searching for drugs and medical information, for example, she stresses checking the reliability of your sources.
If you visit Calishain's site for the book at Web Search Garage (which redirects to the book's page at her ResearchBuzz site) there is a link to the table of contents and an example chapter. She also has two `freebie' articles, `Four Things Yahoo Can Do that Google Can't' and `Seven Ways to Save Time Searching' that are further good examples of her writing and the usefulness of the content. She also has an offer for a free six-month subscription to ResearchBuzzExtra, her paid extension to ResearchBuzz.
This volume has gone for breadth instead of depth. That, and the low starting point should make it an ideal beginners book. Since I had on hand my daughter Jessica (a slightly tech-savvy twelve-year-old with a brand-new broadband connection), I lent her my copy of the book. The response:
"This book is absolutely fantastic and I love it to death! I loved how Tara writes about Google and Yahoo and also about smaller search engines. By reading this book you find out how to find the exact information that you want. Also there are many websites in this book that are very helpful. To make the most of them I wrote them down then later checked them out on the internet. There are heaps of helpful sites for kids and heaps for all ages. Sites for fun and sites for information. I love that it is written as if Tara is talking to you and you are just reading instead of listening. It's a really cool book but if you are going to read it you need to know a little about searching the internet first. A really great book."
Jessica is correct about the language. Tara has written in a light, conversational style that lends itself to quick reading. At the same time either the writing or the editing has been quite tight, the information is packed in. This is a book that needs, indeed deserves, a second read.
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. Clean Out Your Google Garage
Feeling Googled out with nowhere to turn? Open to page one of Tara Calishan's Web Search Garage and you will breath a sigh of relief. This book exposes a world of resources beyond Google and within it. Calishan breaks down search engines and browsers into categories and explains when and how to use them.
If you're tech-savy, you'll follow several of the more complicated sections such as "optimizing your browser for security." But even if you lean to pen and paper like me, Web Search Garage will teach you shortcuts to finding what you're looking for on the Internet.
The Elements, Principles and Examples of Web Searching
How many of us browse and search the web for living? Tara Calishain does, and has been doing this for ten years now. Then, it should come as no surprise that she is able, in this fine new book, to summarize the web searching wisdom she has gathered over the years and conceptualize something that by its nature goes against simple hierarchies.
The book covers...
Part I: The Elements of Web Searching:
- search engines
- directories
- toolbars and other browser gadgets
Part II: The Principles of Web Searching (I found this to be a very refreshing view on the subject -- combining the abstract with the examples):
- the principle of unique language (how the language of the query influences the results)
- the principle of the reinvented wheel (communities, usenet, etc.)
- the principle of onions (imaging pealing those layers and finding deeper and deeper information)
- the principle of nicknames (my last name changed since I got married; guess what, so did the results when searching for those name variations)
- the principle of every scrap (how to refine your searches based on the previous results)
- the principles of mass similar (extending the name searches into the branding world)
- the principle of the world beyond (bringing in the experts)
- the principle of the expanding web (as if you didn't know the universe and its projection on the web is ever expanding)
- the principle of applied power (special syntaxes for the major search engines and the precision they bring)
- the principle of salt grains (whom can you trust on the web?)
I am not sure I would have named those principles the way they are in the book but I trust Tara and her editor had a reason to pick those chapter titles.
Next comes Part III: Searching The Web with a special focus on news searching, job searching and local search. Tara takes your hand and leads you to places you (or at least I) never knew they existed on the web.
Part IV, Searching for Multimedia (images and augio, what about video?), Part V: Searching for People (including genealogy research online), Part VI: Consumer Searching (product information with special emphasis on drugs and medical information and kid-safe searching), all round up a very thorough book with more helpful tips than you can absorb for days.
Last but not least, a book focussed almost entirely on non-geeks offers a chapter on "technical support", and concludes with international information search. I would love to see this last topic expanded into a book of its own, and maybe one day such a project will see the light. For now, let's be grateful to Tara Calishain and Eben Hewitt, the Garage series editor at Prentice Hall PTR, for taking a pragmatic approach to knowledge sharing and bringing a needed book by a thoughtful author to an eager audience.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to expand their understanding and use of the vast ocean of knowledge called the World Wide Web. Web Search Garage
No matter what your level of Internet experience, this book will teach you something. The Google section alone contains many gems but the book goes on to describe several other search engines, some obscure and some well kwnown. The author also covers browsers, plug-ins and many other topics not traditionally covered in search engine books. "Web Search Garage" is written in a very friendly and easy to read style that doesn't get bogged down undefined terminology and every step is explained clearly.
This book basically has something for everyone and I promise you won't read this book without learning something new. More Customer Reviews:
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(13 reviews)
