Small book review: The advanced internet searcher's handbook

In this post, I will give my mind about a recent reading on internet search. First of all, I should say that I really enjoy reading this book. It is written in an informal way, which is really nice for people whose mother language is not English (like me). When you read this book, you feel like Phil Bradley is speaking to you personally and it's a real pleasure.

Basically, The advanced internet searcher's handbook shows you how to get information from the web with simple and clear examples. The book covers nearly all kind of research on the internet. The main ideas that come out of this reading could be summarized in one sentence: Don't trust a unique web engine and keep checking information with other sources of information. The book clearly shows the drawbacks of search engines such as Google. For example, a whole chapter is dedicated to the hidden web (not accessible to Google).

I conclude by saying that this book widely covers basics of search engine (the advanced in the title is certainly too much) and has very interesting chapters about weblogs, mailing lists and newsgroup. To my mind, the chapters about finding people and search tips are useless (straightforward). Finally, the author is a librarian, not a computer scientist. Therefore, the "how to find information" aspect is very nice, but the "how to use the web" is often less interesting (e.g. the finding people chapter).

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