Searching for Book/Author Information on the Web

The most valuable piece of information I can give you about searching for information on a book is to put the name of the book in quotes. This tells your search engine that you are only interested in the words in that order. This is very useful if you are looking for information on "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" and not so useful if you are looking for information on "Night".

Many of the hits that you are going to get on any book are commercial hits - where you can purchase the book. One way to remedy this is to use Google's "advanced search" tab located to the right of the search window. It will take you to a page where you can limit your search to the .edu domain which will only cull from educational sites, primarily universities and other learning institutions.

Also, searching for the author's name with the book's title will often lead to the author's personal page. While this is certainly going to be biased in favor of the author's work, there are often links to reviews and interviews that you may find useful.

And now - a few words about Wikipedia.Wikipedia is such a pain in my neck. I love it for its communal nature, but since it gets so many hits, it is nearly always in the top 10 results for any search. It is not that it is full of lies as some would claim, but that it is not always entirely true. It can be a good source for quick background information but little else. Any facts you find here should be double checked in another resource.

For an example - take a look at the interesting entry on Lucy Larcom. See if you can find the cleverly placed misinformation! Also, the site about.com often takes their information directly from Wikipedia making it generally just as unciteable.