Everyone knows how to call up a search site, tap in some keywords, and hope for something relevant. But to get valuable and speedy results from Web search engines, you need some advanced knowledge. The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines tells you what you need to know.

This book shows you how to assemble high-quality queries on major search sites. In addition to providing a general tutorial on composing Boolean searches--that's all the AND, OR, and NOT stuff--Randolph Hock shows you how to use each site's special search terms and characters. He explains how to do proximity searches on Lycos, for example, and how to limit a HotBot search to information no more than a week old.

If you're publishing information on a Web site and want to increase its chances of coming up in search results, be sure to check out Hock's information on how documents get pulled into the engines' databases and how they're indexed. Documented sites include AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Yahoo, and others. Hock doesn't pay enough attention to searches for nontext media--a search for MP3 files and clip art would have been helpful. Coverage of non-U.S. search tools is lacking as well. But what's here satisfies most needs. --David Wall