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Yahoo! to the Max
An Extreme Searchers Guide
Hock, Randolph
Publisher: Cyberage Books, Medford NJ, USAYear Published: 2005
Pages: 236pp Price: $33.95 ISBN: 0-910965-69-2
Library of Congress Number: ZA4234 Y33H63 2005 Dewey: 025.04--dc22
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Hock is an award-winning writer and Internet trainer. His previous book for CyberAge was The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook (2004). Except for a few screen shots, this book looks like it was put to bed at the end of 2004. While this currently reduces its up-to-date usefulness, it is still a reader-friendly guide to online research, communications, investments, and e-commerce through the Yahoo portal. Forty or so features are explained, including the invaluable My Yahoo, the News Alerts, and Instant Messaging. At one time Yahoo was a leader, but now it comes up with its own competitive versions of stuff developed by other companies such as AOL (for IM) or Google (News, Toolbar). Yahoo had E-mail accounts long before Google, but its storage was a mere 2 MB. When Google began GMail, it upped the free storage to 1 GB - and Yahoo responded in kind. Previously, the extra storage was a "premium" which Yahoo subscribers had to pay for. The Yahoo drill-through directory is its best contribution, but this is not really mentioned anywhere in the book. My Yahoo is a solid reason for my using the system, with its built-in RSS feeds, features, news, weather, sports, etc. But otherwise there is nothing particularly Canadian about Yahoo except its affiliation with Rogers (not mentioned in the book) and its "dot ca" domain, which is ultimately confusing to many in the U.S. My wife has a Yahoo.Ca account, but many of her American friends get back bounces if they type in Yahoo.Com instead. Apparently, Yahoo has no system of forwarding. Personally, I've found loading Google to be faster than Yahoo on dialup. But they are about the same on broadband. Why? Maybe it's because Yahoo has more images in its adverts (Google's ads are largely text-based URLs).
Audience or interest level: Internet users, reporters, those wishing to utilize Yahoo.
Some interesting facts: "This book is aimed at helping you easily identify and use the parts of Yahoo! that are relevant to you. It is arranged so that you can readily spot and skip over the sections that are obviously of no interest."
What I don't like about this resource (its shortcomings): there are disclaimer notices - why are these necessary?
What I do like about this resource (its positives): a solid introduction to Yahoo. There are weblinks and updates at www.extremesearcher.com.
Quality-to-Price Ratio: 87
[Review by Dean Tudor]
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