501 Web Site Secrets: Unleash the Power of Google®, Amazon®, eBay® and More

Rating:
Summary: Not quite secrets
Review: I'm not sure how finding your local weather on Yahoo! is a secret. But it is worthwhile, and as long as you look at the book as 501 helpful hints and pointers, you will do alright.

The book is organized into chapters by site; CNN, ESPN, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and more.

A good Christmas present for someone new to the Internet or just getting excited about it.

Rating:
Summary: Review
Review: The book, 501 Web Site Secrets, written by Michael Miller, is a "how-to" book that contains hidden tips, or "secrets," covering 20 of the most popular Internet web sites. It is about providing the consumer with more knowledge and skill at using the most popular web sites on the Internet.

Organized into 20 chapters, each covering a particular web site such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay, information is presented in small bites that fit the style of people who like their information in easily readable summaries. This style works very well.

Targeted at users of the Internet, which includes just about everybody from Internet-savvy people to beginners who are just learning how to use the Internet and all that it offers, the book meets it objective-showing people different, better, or "hidden" ways to use their favorite web sites. Experienced or casual browsers will find useful morsels of information to help better utilize these popular web sites whether they are browsing for specific data in support of their research or just having fun surfing the Internet. For instance, did you know that Google can perform a search on your subject that also includes words similar to your search word? On page 123, the author reveals a way to do this: just include the tilde as the first character of your search word, i.e., if you are searching for "elderly" type in "~elderly" and Google will find pages that not only use the word "elderly" but also related words so web pages containing the words "senior" and "older" would also be part of your search results.

The book's layout is easy-to-follow. Each web site is covered in a chapter by itself and the table of contents provides a quick reference to sections so the reader may go directly to the "secrets" of the web site they like the most. The author's writing style also contributes to an easy read. He uses plain language and does not use confusing, technical jargon, and his examples are very good.

There is one thing, though. In future editions, I would like to see some type of spiral binding so the book may lay open when a person is using it at the computer. Different methods of holding the book open, i.e., cordless phones, clipping heavy pens to the pages, etc., were used and this was just inconvenient.

Bottom line: Is 501 Web Site Secrets worth the read? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yes.

Bobby

Rating:
Summary: Tips are obvious; not innovative
Review: There seems to be something akin to a credentials push between O'Reilly and Wiley. O'Reilly has a series of Hacks books, with 100 tips in each. Is that why we have this book, with 501 web "secrets"? One upsmanship?

Firstly, the secrets in the title is hype. None of the tips can really be called a secret. While Miller does admit this in his Introduction, it is irritating to see each tip labelled as a secret, throughout the book.

But let's leave this aside and look at the tips. Many are really obvious. Like tip 224 - "Fine tune your search with AltaVista's advanced Web Search page". People, the Altavista home page has an 'advanced' link right there. Or look at tip 27 - "Use Yahoo to get the latest news, weather and sports". Again, these links are right there on the Yahoo home page. Plus, the headlines of recent new articles are also shown on the page, as an inducement for readers to clickthrough.

These 501 tips are quantity stressed over quality. Many are stunningly obvious, like those above. And if we say "secrets", then they become inane. A far better approach would have been to reduce the number of tips, and give more detail on some truly innovative and nonobvious usages of the major websites. It would have required far more work and originality than evidenced here.