Searching & Researching on the Internet & the World Wide Web

Book excerpt: Hartman and Ackermann (both, Mary Washington College) offer a work on how to search for information on the Internet. They thoroughly overview Internet searching and discuss search tools and strategies: directories, search engines, and specialized tools; searching for news and multimedia; and citing and evaluating Internet information. The strength of this book is the hands-on chapters that contain examples meant to appeal to students from a variety of disciplines. Each chapter contains practice exercises designed to allow readers to master fundamental search skills. Additionally, the chapters are compartmentalized, allowing readers to skip materials they feel are unnecessary or with which they are already familiar. The target audience for this book is readers with little knowledge of Internet searching and those who desire a primer on this topic. However, this book is also a helpful resource for any level of Web searcher because it contains in-depth information on current search engines and their features, as well as other relevant Internet search tools.