Web Search Garage

Tara Calishain's Web Search Garage is one of the smartest and most useful web research guides we've ever seen. No surprise, perhaps: Calishain's ResarchBuzz.com is one of the Web's handiest research resources (even Time magazine's noticed it).

Calishain starts off with the "elements" o

Tara Calishain's Web Search Garage is one of the smartest and most useful web research guides we've ever seen. No surprise, perhaps: Calishain's ResarchBuzz.com is one of the Web's handiest research resources (even Time magazine's noticed it).

Calishain starts off with the "elements" of searching: the techniques, gadgets, and tweaks that'll help you find what you're looking for faster, with less of the junk you don't need. Next, the "principles" of searching: approaches that'll help you figure out where and how to look. (For example, the Principle of the Reinvented Wheel: whatever you're interested in, chances are there's a community of people already interested in it. Find the community, and you'll find the answers.) Calishain's "Principle of Salt Grains" chapter even helps you decide whether you can trust what you've found, based on a few simple questions you can ask about any page or site (or email chain letter!).

Here, too, are the sources, including plenty you might not have known about (like, for example, the Web's best obituary databases, or where to find great photos of famous 19th-century Americans). And, finally, here are examples: prefabricated searches that are likely to find exactly what you're looking for.

So what are you looking for? ZIP codes? Audio clips? Your ex-girlfriend? Your state's Do Not Call registry? Human experts? Song lyrics? Labor statistics? Look here first, and you're 90 percent there. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2003 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.