This is the third edition of The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook and it updates the 2007 edition. Randolph Hock likens his approach to internet searching to splitting a muffin with a fork rather than a knife, allowing searchers to “savour the extra tastiness from the internet” by going beyond the leading search engines to explore myriad resources, tools and strategies which are now available.
This book is a highly useful guide for librarians, teachers, researchers, students and anyone else wanting to use the internet for more serious search purposes. It assumes that readers are comfortable with the basics of searching and suggests ways to build on existing skills in order to search for information more effectively and accurately.
The first chapter includes a brief history of the internet; an overview of “finding tools”; general information about search strategies; a guide to assessing the quality of content; and a note about copyright issues. The following three chapters describe in greater detail the various types of “finding tools” available: directories and portals, and search engines. This section of the book gives extremely detailed guidance of search techniques, not only for each type of finding aid, but also for specific tools. I am sure that most readers would learn something new, even about those tools they felt they knew well. My only criticism of this section is that, although the author gives exhaustive descriptions of individual tools, there is little comparison or commentary to suggest which would be useful for different types of tasks.
As the author points out, discussion groups, forums and newsgroups can be valuable information sources, but difficult to mine. In chapter 5, he describes how to search for groups and messages and how to find groups or mailing lists of interest.
Quick reference tools is the topic of chapter 6, providing brief reviews of encyclopaedias, dictionaries, gazetteers, directories and similar resources. It is worth noting that the majority of the examples provided are US‐based, making this chapter of only limited use to readers in other countries who would probably need to identify local resources too.
Searching the billions of multimedia resources now available online can be difficult and time‐consuming, but in chapter 7 Hock suggests a number of techniques and finding aids which can help to locate images, audio and video online.
Chapter 8 differs from the previous chapters as it deals with a specific type of information: news. As the author points out, news is being provided from an over‐increasing range of sources and examples are given of both particular types of online resource and aggregation sites.
Chapter 9 is devoted to “finding products”. I wish this chapter had been omitted as it felt incongruent in this book which is otherwise devoted to more scholarly use of the internet.
With the growing popularity of Web 2.0, it is no surprise that the final chapter of this book is given over to resources creation: social networks, file sharing, blogs and website building. Attempting to cover these topics in a single chapter is ambitious, but is gives readers a flavour of what is possible as well as links to some useful resources.
The book also includes a glossary and full list of websites listed by chapter. The latter is also available online (www.extremesearcher.com/handbooklinks.html), which hopefully means it will be updated.
This book is clearly laid out and easy to read. The author succeeds in giving in‐depth advice about using the internet, while avoiding technical jargon. I would recommend The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook to anyone who teaches information skills or internet use, or who uses the internet for scholarly research. In fact, anyone who uses the internet regularly would find the associated website a useful finding aid in its own right.
