This comprehensive book makes many original contributions to the field of genres on the web. The identification and characterization of genres is of obvious interest to “pure” linguistics, but as this book makes clear, there are some important practical applications. Chief amongst these will be the advent of genre-aware search engines, where users will be able to specify not only their topics of interest, but the desired genre of the returned web pages, as in the WEGA search engine described in this book by Stein et al. Crowston et al. give the example of someone wishing to buy a digital camera. A traditional search engine would return pages on the topic of the specified brand of digital cameras, most of which will just be the web sites of sellers. But what the buyer really wants is information about this type of camera in certain genres only, such as product reviews and opinion-bearing blogs, which provide the opinions of people who have already bought that camera. The...