Customer Reviews

Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW

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

 

 

I found this to be a wonderful book about Search Engines. If you like history, math, computer science, and how we can make computers communicate effectively with people, then this book is a great read. With current Search Engines, we enter some words and get back a bibliography. I look forward to a sequel: "Answer Engines: How You Can Enter a Short, Simple Question and Get Back a Short, Simple Answer (NOT a list of things to read)!"

I wonder if I was reading the same book as a couple of the reviewers!

IMHO there are (too) many books in this field that deal with how search engines work, but the more 'slippery' concepts associated with how people actually use them to find about information have received much less attention.

The book provides a very welcome cognitive science perspective on a discipline often dominated by those who seek overly simple mechanistic formulas and 'answers' to very tricky 'questions'.

Bunch of blocks and citations from other authors with absolutely no explanations. It doesnt look like author understands anything that he borrowed from others to compose this book or dare to give one calculation example or derive a formula. Horrible, horrible book for a novice.

This book, aside from being horribly written, full of awful grammar and confused writing, everything being derivative, etc. (see the next review), suffers from over-stylization. The author seems to have just discovered the bold, italic and underline buttons of his word processor and does not hesitate to use them, along with quotation marks, all caps and margin notes, almost interchangeably. This makes the book very hard to read because your eyes are going from one... styled word or phrase to another.

Please, don't buy this book or use it for your course.

Though I have not Taken Dr. Belew's class, I know he is a consumate professional in his field. His Ideas are new and revolutionary. There are a lot of concepts in the book that I am still trying to grasp, but Belew really does a good job of explaining new concepts in a comprehensive way. He is really an asset to the Computer Science community.