Are you looking for something on the Internet and need more than the results you find with a quick Google or Bing search? If so, this might be just the book you’re looking for. Randolph Hock’s “Extreme Searchers’ Handbook of the Internet: A Guide for Serious Searchers” is touted as the essential guide for anyone who uses the Internet for research: librarians, teachers, students, writers, business professionals, and others who need to search. In Internet. website with ease. The book provides strategies and tools (including search engines, portals, and social networks) for all the major content areas of the Internet. The author explains how and when to go beyond the major search engines and offers techniques for using Web 2.0 resources like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and more.

Here is the really good thing about this book. Hock has organized it very well, so that you can easily find what you are looking for, and also the book is written for everyone. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a computer geek to understand this book. In fact, it is written for the non-techie or geek, and for anyone who just wants to use the Internet and the web to locate information. Once again, the book is well organized. It begins with a detailed table of contents, then a list of the book’s figures and tables, a foreword, and then an introduction that includes a brief overview of the chapters and some advice on how to proceed. There is also a page on the website that accompanies this book that you will probably want to check out. I am planning to use it.

The book is divided into ten chapters that focus on the basics for the serious seeker; directories and portals; the basics of search engines; more details about search engines; discussion groups, forums, newsgroups and their relatives; an internet reference shelf; sights and sounds, or how to find images, audio and video; news resources; find products online and your own place on the web, participate and publish. All of these chapters contain many websites and lots of practical information on how to find what you are looking for. There are so many different places to look for things, and this guide really helps you figure out the best places to look for what you need. At the back, there is a list of all the sites covered in the book, and if you visit the attached website, the links are provided there.

Easy enough for the novice, but with insights even experts may not know, this book contains the information to turn anyone into an advanced internet finder or, in other words, an extreme search engine.