In this paper we introduce a method of improving efficiency of the moment estimator of Dekkers, Einmahl and de Haan(1989) for the extreme value index $eta$. a new estimator of $eta$ is proposed by adding the third moment ot the original moment estimator which is composed of the first two moments of the log-transformed sample data. We establish asymptotic normality of the new estimator and examine and adaptive procedure for the new estimator. The resulting adaptive estimator proves to be asymptotically better than the moment estimator particularly for $eta$<0.