The Extreme Searcher’s Guide to Web Search Engines: A Handbook for the Serious Searcher. 2nd ed.

Citation

Mason, D. (2003), "The Extreme Searcher’s Guide to Web Search Engines: A Handbook for the Serious Searcher. 2nd ed.", The Electronic Library, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 380-380. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470310491612

This is an excellent guide to using Internet search engines, aimed at helping the information professional get more out of the Internet. This is not a technical book, although it does go into considerable detail about the workings of eight of the best search engines.

The book starts with a brief history of search engines, explaining their origins and development and then defines the elements that make up a search engine – the crawlers, database, indexer and formatting functions. Hock shows that the common image of a search engine as comprising basically of a proprietary database and retrieval software is wrong; several leading search engines in fact use other search engines’ databases, and some use the same retrieval software. He then goes on to examine the latest in search engine interfaces, the information portal. The changing nature of search engines means that the skilled searcher needs to be able to assess them not only on their pure search capabilities but also on the productivity features built into the portal.

The book is aimed at professional, or at least skilled, searchers so it does not try to teach search techniques. What it does show is what features are available in each search engine, how each search engine parses the search terms, and how a skilled user can tweak the engines to get the best results. It also explains how each engine ranks its results, and the size, scope and overlap of the engine’s databases. There are comprehensive tables of search options and features, including ways to access images, videos and sound archives. It is this depth of knowledge that distinguishes this book from other search guides.

The bulk of the book is devoted to an in‐depth analysis of eight leading search engines: Altavista, Excite, Fast Search, Google, Hotbot, Lycos, Northern Light and Yahoo! Each gets a full chapter to itself, and this gives enough space to cover the search engine in detail. Each chapter gives an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the engine, an analysis of its home page pointing out all its options and indicating how to access little known or unpublicised features, an explanation of the search engine logic, and an evaluation of the underlying database. The chapter then describes any related searchable databases and any links to portal features such as news, stock prices or sports.

There is a short chapter on meta‐search engines that describes what they are and how they operate. Hock discusses search strategies with meta‐search engines versus stand‐alone search engines and publishes some indicative comparison results tables. Expanded feature lists and syntax guides are given for Dogpile, ixquick, MetaCrawler, ProFusion and Search.com

The final chapter gives advice on how to keep up to date in the rapidly changing world of the search professional and offers a collection of Internet sources for conferences, journals and search engine comparisons.

This book reflects an extraordinary depth of knowledge in an easily accessible form, and offers a practical no‐nonsense guide for the advanced user.