Hello. My name is Tara Calishain.
My mother was a technical services librarian until she retired. My grandmother worked in the printing department at North Carolina State University for over 20 years. Her husband and her husband’s grandfather were both clockmakers. At the intersection of categorization and words and cogs and gears you will find me.
I have been writing about search engines since the early 1990s. My first book, Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, came out in 1996. Since then I have authored or co-authored a number of books, including Web Search Garage, Information Trapping, and the New York Times bestseller Google Hacks. I have also written for a number of publications, including The Guardian and the Saturday Evening Post. Since 1998 I have written ResearchBuzz, a blog that covers both resource updates and search techniques and observations about the search world.
In late 2021 I discovered that I am autistic. That led me to consider the reasons for my educational failures (I did not manage to graduate high school) in a different light, and I decided to see if I could learn JavaScript and start experimenting with 25 years’ worth of thoughts about search.
I could indeed.
In April 2022 I started learning JavaScript, and since then have created a number of different Web sites as I learned things and experimented and basically rampaged through the mental compost heaps generated by almost 30 years’ of obsessively thinking about search and experimenting with search and reverse-engineering search engine SERP URLs.
Eventually I realized if I was going to scatter Web sites everywhere I needed to have a personal one. I also want a place to talk more about my feelings about search. As I learn more JavaScript and create more search tools, I find myself developing a set of principles around which I make them. (I did something similar for Web Search Garage.)
I’m always up to talk about Web search, open data access, content curation, and online information collections.
Thanks for visiting.