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WebSeeker for Windows
by by Donald Rosenfield—NOCCC cardar@home.com - January 14, 2000 at 15:54:15:
WebSeeker Search Engines: 111 + all you want to add—• Mamma Search Engines: 10
• Network Express Search Engines: 10
• Northern Lights # of web pages: 205,540,000
• Soli.com Search Engines: 64
• Searchpower.com Search Engines: 2284
I came across the Mamma.com and the Network Express Websites while looking for something else. Mamma.com bills themselves as the Mother of all Meta Search Engines on the Internet. I guess WebSeeker for Windows kinda leaves both of those search engines in the dust.
I used WebSeeker for Windows to search “search engines” and came up with searchpower.com. Its home page says that it has 2284 search engines but you are limited to just 100 listings per search and when I struck out on a search I was given an optional list to search that included just 22 engines, which seems kinda strange. Northern Lights is one of WebSeeker’s search engines.
I have been a customer of Soli.com for several years and never noticed before now that they have a Big Search department with all those search engines. Of course, there’s no way to add search engines save asking the Webmaster to add those you want.
I have been using Blue Squirrel’s more limited — but free—EasySeeker and decided to look at their professional program. I’m glad that I did. I tend to tire of advertising banners, something you can turn off in WebSeeker. The reason they have them in the first place is that sometimes the search finds the string inside a banner.
Socking The Wind—In order for WebSeeker to work you need to have a 32-bit Winsock operating To ensure that, make sure that either Netscape or Internet Explorer is operating properly.
Choices, Decisions; What Next?—WebSeeker offers you the choice of three levels of search techniques, InstantFind, CleanFind, and FilterFind. The most accurate kind is FilterFind, which downloads and indexes each search result page. It offers the advantages of both InstantFind and CleanFind. CleanFind weeds out broken or dead links that litter the results lists of other search engines and InstantFind works as fast as it can while eliminating duplicates.
Operators—I’ve written about Boolean operators before, in my review of the Encylopædia Britannica. Here you are given a choice of AND, OR, PHRASE, and SUBSTRING. Let’s use the words Jim and Karsjens. The operators affect your search in the following ways:
Choose “AND” and you will only get pages that contain both the word Jim and the word Karsjens Choose “OR” and you will get all the pages that contain the word Jim and all the pages that contain the word Karsjens. Choose “PHRASE” and you will get only the pages that contain the phrase Jim Karsjens with no words between Jim and Karsjens. Choose ”SUBSTRING” and you will get any pages containing Jim, Jimmy, Jim-Dandy, Karsjens, Karsjensetzki, etc.
When no operator is chosen, WebSeeker uses OR by default. (I did a WebSeeker search of Jim Karsjens and got 185 hits. On reading a couple of them, I found my own name in the article! Admittedly, that was an “OR” search which probably picked up some of Jim’s relatives in Minnesota.)
New Search Engines—You can easily add new search engines to WebSeeker. WebSeeker delivers a clean list of results that can be saved, viewed offline, is easily organized, monitors the Internet for any changes, schedules automatic, unattended searches, and for registered users, automatically updates itself over the Internet.
WebSeeker for Windows can be obtained from the Website at: http://www.bluesquirrel.com/ or by calling 800.403.0925. Various options are offered including a demo version. A wide selection of other products for Internet use for home and business use are shown on the Website, some of which I will be reviewing in the coming issues. Also available is Blue Squirrel’s no-cost Internet Research Course.
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