With the rather ambitious title of Searching 2.0, Michael P. Sauers states that he's written this book to provide an “upgrade” of both “searching skills and applications of basic search strategies”, something made necessary by the vast number of new tools and resources available to internet users when compared with a decade ago.
In fact, the book is more of a step‐by‐step how‐to guide for those using some of the major Web 2 sites of the moment; it does not directly address search skills per se, beyond the searching of the sites held up as exemplars, which are limited to those offered by a handful of major service providers – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon – as well as Wikipedia and The Wayback Machine, a service of the Internet Archive.
The tone is lively and chatty, with everything about the prose designed not to intimidate novices – for example, “Don't worry about it right now; it'll all make sense by the end, I promise” and “I apologize for repeating myself but I feel I need to say this again”. This could to some readers appear slightly patronising – and at times, it is – “The concept of Web 2.0 is often bogged down in a lot of technology‐related gobbledygook” – but nevertheless, Sauer's narrative remains engaging, conveying a sense both of pace and good‐humour. Short, sharp overviews of what can, to the uninitiated, appear daunting (how to navigate the sites discussed; which features and tools they offer) are neatly and clearly explained.
Much of the book is taken up by greytone screenshots, which are of good quality. These work well, creating something like the “active learning” experience of many school textbooks. Indeed, there are even exercises at the end of each chapter. Usefully, Sauers has created a companion website where links to every resource referenced (108 of them in total) are available as bookmarks on a dedicated delicious page.
A great deal of time is spent working through each example – 46 pages on delicious alone; whether the websites under scrutiny warrant this level of explanation is perhaps questionable given that most of what the book covers could be figured out by going online and looking around. At times, Searching 2.0 does over‐explain things that are probably, for most people, fairly intuitive or easy to figure out – for example, a section on Flickr's “Search by Date” options explains that “Photos taken” means the date the photo was taken while “Photos uploaded” means the date they were uploaded, and so on.
However, the book's introductory chapter – What is Web 2.0? – provides a crisp, valuable overview of the topic and a useful discussion of taxonomies and folksonomies.
As the book proceeds, there is some discussion of how all this relates to librarianship and particularly to reference requests. Otherwise, discussions of professional practice are somewhat limited, except, most notably, where copyright issues are raised, only to then be deemed out of scope: “Some question what Google will do with all of this preserved content in the long run and the potential copyright and privacy implications of keeping all of these copies, but for our purposes, we're glad they're doing what they're doing”. Similarly, there is a brief justification of why it makes sense to direct users to content that may infringe broadcasters' IPR on YouTube.
Microsoft and Google technologies and products get repeated mentions. More discussion of the Open Source philosophy underpinning or inspiring much of Web 2, and particularly of the Creative Commons licensing system would have been worthwhile. While the book is admittedly for beginners and can't cover everything, the legal aspects of content use and re‐use are surely familiar to librarians and are highly relevant.
It might have been useful then to refer to some professional, clearly legitimate, sound and audio archives – these are harder to find for users, but there are many such sites and services out there where clips can be viewed (although not downloaded) without payment (for example sites and services such as the BBC Motion Gallery, the Internet Archive's Moving Image Archive and many archival websites). Some of these sites even also host YouTube channels (for example the journal Nature or the Scottish Screen Archive). Although there is a discussion of The Wayback Machine – part of a useful discussion on “Searching the Past”, the rest of the Internet Archive is not considered.
The chapter on “Print Books” looks only at Google Books and Amazon's “Search Inside the Book” service while “Searching for Media” covers only Flickr, YouTube and Podscope. Interestingly, a Web 2 site clearly in scope – Wikimedia Commons – doesn't get mentioned.
There are then, clear omissions, and the decision to focus only a few seemingly favourite or “hot at the moment” sites, is a little blinkered, meaning that in the long‐term the book's relevance may not be ensured, especially given the rapid development of Web 2 tools and technologies.
While it would be a stretch to suggest that anyone other than a beginner or semi‐experienced user would find this book useful, beginners are the intended audience and the author doesn't go beyond suggesting that you could use it as a “blueprint” to assist in imparting your knowledge to others. For this, it will be extremely useful. It is certainly good to use as a reference book that will sit beside you on your desktop as you get up to speed with the various sites it investigates.
