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African Studies Research: A Guide to Effective Web Searching [Pilot edition, September 2004] by Hans M. Zell
Hans Zell Publishing Glais
Bheinn w Lochcarron
w Ross-shire IV54 8YB w Scotland w UK
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The Google phenomenon The Google “answer machine” vs. library reference services III Google’s Web Search
IV Google’s other search services
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I am grateful to Roger Stringer of TextPertise, Harare, for reviewing and commenting on a draft of this guide, and for helpful copy-editing suggestions. In writing the guide, I have consulted extensively Google’s online Help pages at http://www.google.com/help/, as well as the separate Help and FAQ pages for the various other search services offered. There are thousands of online articles about Google, and Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/ has 39 entries for Google under its “Books” search section, which includes the inevitable Google for Dummies (John Wiley, 2003) – but also Barney Google & Snuffy Smith and Oogle-google-goo! I have found the following two books particularly useful: How to Do Everything with Google by Fritz Schneider, Nancy Blachman, and Eric Fredricksen (Emeryville, CA: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004). Nancy Blachman is also the author of Google Guide, an excellent interactive tutorial on searching with Google at http://www.googleguide.com. Both of these sources are primarily for the general user – both novices and intermediate users – and for anyone who wants to learn how to use Google, although that is not of course to suggest that specialists, academics, librarians, or other seasoned Google cognoscenti, would not also benefit from consulting it. Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2003). Offers “100 industrial-strength tips and tools” to make the Google searching experience more fruitful, and also contains some very useful tips for Webmasters. It is, however, a book more for programmers, software developers and others that are technically minded, rather than for the average user, and much of the content is devoted to the Google Applications Program Interface (API), which is not discussed in my own guide. With the Google Web API service, software developers can query more than 4 billion Web pages directly from their own computer programs, and can write programs for the search and retrieval of information based on Google results. For more details, and to download a developer’s kit, go to http://www.google.com/apis/. Tara Calishain, the co-author of Google Hacks, also hosts the ResearchBuzz Web site at http://www.researchbuzz.com/, a rich source of information for the latest news and developments about search engines, including frequent items about Google. She also offers a free weekly ResearchBuzz Newsletter.
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