Customer Reviews

Find It Online: The Complete Guide to Online Research, Second Edition

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book deserves more than 5 stars for making the Internet fully accessible to anyone for a minimum of cost in time and money.

If you have enough skill to turn on your computer and get onto the Internet, this book will take you where you want to go in the fastest, least frustrating way. Within hours, you will be more efficient and effective than people who have done online research for years, but have not yet read this book.

Although Web addresses and sites will change, the best basic methods of how to do research online will shift much less often. You should be able to apply what you learn from this book for some time to come.

Some of the many helpful things you will learn include:

(1) which search engines work best for which kinds of questions

(2) how to get the fewest possible sites from a search with the greatest likelihood that they will be helpful to you

(3) which sources of information to go to directly without a search first

(4) how to assess the credibility of a source

(5) how to get things for free that most people pay for

(6) when to spend money to save time

(7) how to manage your e-mail to spend less time on it.

You will also benefit from three sample search models in chapter 12, one for finding a person, another for doing a business profile, and a third for problem solving. Most of your searches will involve one of these three search types.

An area you may not think about now is what people can learn about you while you do your research. The sections on privacy issues and how you can protect yourself are outstanding.

About a third of the book is devoted to indexes to make it easier for you to find government public records and the right Web site for your research needs.

Even though I have been doing online research for many years, I plan to keep this book next to my computer from now on. If you read many of my reviews, you will notice that that is something I rarely say about a book.

After you have finished learning how to do better and faster online research with this wonderful resource, I suggest that you step back and think about new questions that you should be asking now that you have improved access to good and timely information. For example, should you be doing more to check out investments? Or should you be learning more about becoming a better parent? Or spouse? Asking and answering those questions will probably be the biggest payoff you can get from this very helpful guide.

Be rich in knowledge and turn it into wisdom!

This is the second of three basic guides by Facts on Demand press that I am very happy to have in my collection and to recommend to others.

Some really top-notch information brokers contributed to this book, and it is a superb reference, well-organized, that lacks a CD-ROM with clickable links or an Online Version to which access can be gained for a fee or from a password in the printed version.

This book is extremely well-developed to the point that it can meet the needs of a first-time researcher eager to become quickly familiar with the ins and outs of the Internet, as well as the more experienced professional that wants a handy reference work to suggest new sources and methods.

The other two books are Helen Burwell's Online Competitive Intelligence, 2nd Edition: Increase Your Profits Using Cyber-Intelligence--the one book to buy if you can only buy one of these three books--and Sankey & Weber's Public Records Online, 6th Edition: The Master Guide to Private & Goverment Online Sources of Public Records (Public Records Online) (buy only if you have do work in this area or want to protect yourself by monitoring your divorced spouse's assets, etc.)

See also:
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time

When Mr. Schlein spoke at a recent seminar, he asked Internet novices to raise their hands. As one severely computer-challenged I did't put mine up, as I had yet achieve that level. However, as a journalist, I picked up the second edition "Find It Online," came home, and started trying to search sites as he described. Wonder of wonders, it worked. The book is written with clarity, in an understandable way and contains a wealth of information for the neophyte as well as for the expert. It is an invaluable tool and a great ego-booster as well.

It used to be that a good reference librarian had only to keep up with the new books being published, and perhaps keep one eye on the newspapers and learned journals. Nowadays, one has to keep track of where best to find the answers to questions on the Web, as well. And it ain't easy! Massive printed volumes of Web addresses weren't much help even a decade ago because they were indiscriminate and seldom included annotations. What we needed -- and still need -- are a few collections of a (relatively) few carefully selected germane Web sites with the reasons given for their inclusion. And this discriminating and well thought out guide is the best one I've seen yet. It's intended mostly for the professional information broker or commercial researcher-for-hire, but librarians in any large public or academic library system do much the same sort of thing and will profit enormously by reading it. After an excellent introduction to the principles of online research, it's divided into topical sections: government resources, public records, news sites, business tools, and international (i.e., non-U.S.) research. Then there are several sections on managing and filtering what you find, how to evaluate its credibility and utility, and privacy concerns. Schlein spends considerable time on fee-based and "hidden" resources, too, not just the freebies on the public Web. Some of the sites he recommends I was already aware of, but there are many others I hadn't run across before. And I have been recommending his advice on search strategies and information massaging to my colleagues. There are a couple of annoying things about this otherwise superior book, however. One is the need for much, much tighter copyediting -- like saying "the software can be moderated" when they meant "modified," and the sometimes eccentric punctuation, and the tendency to break Web addresses in peculiar places (letting only the last character of ".html" fall to the next line gives you a quite different address). The other annoyance is a tendency by the author to laud (frequently) any book published by his editors, associates, or advisors -- so much so that it becomes embarrassing. But given the high quality of the book's actual content, I suppose I can live with that.

Since the first minute I opened this book, I knew this was the book I was looking for - a serious book for online research. FIND IT ONLINE not only gives you hundreds of specialized online sources in a well-organized manner, but it also explains how the web is organized, how to define your search, which tool to use, and how to manage and evaluate the data you find. The book is arranged so you can use it as a reference or read it through. I found FIND IT ONLINE extremely well-written and full of expert knowledge. Thank you, Mr. Schlein!

I'm somewhere in the middle of average search-freak and power-user. When I scanned the first edition, I was amazed at the number of useful tips it offered. As I got more proficient at searching, I would refer back to the book, and start to pick up the little nuances it offered.
The Third Edition is just that more valuable and detailed than the First. I've given almost a dozen of them as gifts, all with the initial reaction of, "How nice -- a book..." Each and every recipient made a special point to thank me by the end of their first week browsing through it. You'll thank someone too, even if it's yourself for finding this great resource.

Alan Schlein is the guru of search and find online . An award winning journalist he knows how to navigate through cyberspace. He includes lots of pointers from industry experts and divides the chapters into easy to find sections ranging from a) search strategy to search tools to b) saving and downloading your results to scouring government documents and public records-- great for ancestry searches and wills and other legal documents to getting the latest in news resourcesonline. A fabulous addition for any business book shelf and it belongs on every researcher's desk. Plus his section on Privacy Protection and your identity is probably worth the price of the book alone. I know and have the honor of having met the author-- he's a sharp guy who continues to update this reference tool and really knows his stuff.

I do online marketing and because of my knowledge of the internet, am often asked to do research projects, as well.

Schlein's book is a wonderful resource and is proving to be a great time-saver for me in my work. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses the internet as a research tool, or simply wants to find information quickly and easily.

This book is a gem. It opens all the doors of the online world that I didn't even know were there. it makes order out of the internet chaos and is a really valuable reference tool. I think I'll tie it to my computer and get copies for everyone in the office so they don't steal mine. Thank god I'll now be able to just hand this out instead of having to answer everyone's basic questions about how to work the Internet.

Tim, head of MIS, a major computer company * (can't put my real title and name or my bosses would see how easy this will make my job.)

FIND IT ONLINE does a great job identifying online resources. It is particulary strong in the area of public records and government resources. The chapter on Government Pubic Records Online contains a detailed listing by state. This alone is worth the price of the book.