Yahoo! is often seen as the poor cousin to Google in the internet world. But while Google is currently winning the search engine popularity stakes, by many other measures, Yahoo! is the richer resource of the two. Randolph Hock's admonition throughout Yahoo! to the Max to “click everywhere” amply demonstrates this: taking Hock at his word quickly made this a very time‐consuming book to review as hours can disappear poking around Yahoo!. Yet this perhaps is the best feature of this excellent book – it encourages readers to discover for themselves the many features an exceptional online resource has to offer.
As a guidebook, Yahoo! to the Max is clearly written and well illustrated, and has some genuinely laugh‐out‐loud moments as Hock opines on certain matters. He does not provide A‐B‐C walkthroughs, but instead discusses what's available in the various sites. He directs readers through such processes as registering and setting up a My Yahoo! page, explaining what the various advantages are over using Yahoo! as an unregistered user. It's at this point that it becomes clear why Hock is himself a fan of Yahoo! – there are advantages to the “online office” aspect of Yahoo!, being able to store files online and access shared calendar and contact lists from anywhere one can access the internet, or personalise online news. Hock provides in‐depth coverage of Yahoo! groups (with sage advice on groups in general), news, mail, messenger (including joint searching – a boon for teaching), chat, auctions, and finance. He also gives brief explanations of many of Yahoo!'s other features such as what the Yahoo! toolbar can do, the travel features, maps, weather, and health information – here stressing the relatively high trustworthiness of the information provided. Along the way, Hock provides tips to the various shortcuts that can be used to get around Yahoo!'s many services.
Hock established an impressive reputation describing online tools in his previous Extreme Searcher books, particularly on search engines. However, he devotes relatively few pages to Yahoo!'s search functions here. Even the web directory that first brought Yahoo! to note is dealt with quickly. As the internet's functionality has grown, so has Yahoo!'s; Hock stresses that Yahoo! changes almost daily, and is impossible to describe definitively. Not surprisingly then, some of Hock's descriptions are out‐of‐date, and much is simply not included. To make up for this, there is an accompanying web site (available at: www.extremesearcher.com) that is continually updated to reflect the changes in Yahoo! – a necessary strategy that considerably extends the useful lifespan of this book. It would have been nice to read more on Yahoo!'s international sites, but there are way too many to cover in this book and this is the sort of thing that the web site could remedy.
Hock has done a great job of describing Yahoo!'s many useful tools, and successfully converted this reviewer from someone who was vaguely aware of Yahoo! into a regular user of its many features. This is an essential book for introducing Internet novices and experts to what a really first‐class web portal can be.
