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Search Engines 4
by By Terry Currier—NOCCC, tcurrier@aol.com - December 02, 2000 at 13:30:36:
I’m going to make this the last installment, before we all get bored with it. The nice thing about writing such articles is that it helps to teach both the writer and the reader. I’m throwing in something about Searchbots. These are programs that when given a search subject will act like megasearch engines. The requested information is given to search engines like Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, Alta Vista and more. The found information is then presented to you. The better ones will allow you to save a report, which you can view whenever you want. The found information is no better then if you went to each search engine yourself, it is just that it goes to all the websites for you. In some ways, if you went to the individual sites directly you would have more control. Looking at the results of some, you would say that this is nothing like what you requested.A couple of things to remember, while the programs are free to download, they pay for themselves by displaying advertisements to you. Some do even worse by including spyware, which is mainly from Conducent. One program, called Zapper, was very up front about it. Their installation states; “Our product’s registration form requires users to provide contact information and optionally, some demographic information.” Zapper Technologies uses customer contact information from the registration form to send the user promotional material from some of its partners. They give you a cookie, which enables them to anonymously (they say) identify your Zapper and track overall Zapper activity. You can also upgrade the programs, usually for about $40, and they won’t display the ads. I backed up my registry before installing them, just in case. When done with the ones I didn’t like I uninstalled them and then ran the spyware remover from Lavasoft, which Lavasoft recommends. It even checks in the registry for things left behind In some cases, (i.e. Web3000), system libraries have been replaced, and Lavasoft ad-aware cannot reverse this operation.
BeeLine—It needs 6446Kb for installation. It is ad supported, and as such, it installs an advertisement on your browser. This is done whether or not you’re using BeeLine at the time. In other words, if you are just logged on the little ad comes up. This works the same with AOL. Also, every so often it flashes up an ad to try and sell their upgrade product, NetSonic. NetSonic installs a cookie on your system. Sign up at their web3000.com site and you can enter to win $10,000. Like iwon.com, they get the money for the contest by selling information about you to others. Anyway, it does do a nice job of finding requested information, and creating reports for the user.— Score 8
Copernic 2000—This is one of the best known and is very good. You can have it search for any information on all of the web or by 27 categories such as kids, music, or health. Searches and results can be sorted on keywords, search modes, last update, or category. Search engines used include AltaVista, Excite, FAST Search, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler, and others. You can send the reports via e-mail and save them in html format. Oddly though, you cannot print it directly, it probably lets you do it in the Pro version. — Score 9
Hurricane WebSearch—I liked this program. It lets you search twelve search engines fast, and all the results of the search are available to you at once. The results are given in a one sheet format so you can scroll down to see the results for all the searches. You can also click on a search engine and it will take you to the results for that specific one. The “history” option enables you to keep many search results, which are accessible whenever required. You have the option to take certain engines off the search. — Score 9
Zapper—This is one that, although Tucows website rated it well, I was not about to install, after reading its license. To get off their list you have to e-mail them, not just uninstall the program.
Nano—This is not a truly a search engine for looking up information. When activated, it searches news sites for information about the word on which you clicked. You can set it for right or left click. It will give you news articles about the subject or suggest or other references to see. It could also recommend places to go for buying books on the matter. I should also add that the application I used was the beta version. No ads were displayed while I used it. — Score 8.5
SurfSaver—It is a browser add-on, which lets you store Web pages directly from your browser into searchable folders. Use SurfSaver to organize and search the information you gather on the Internet. After you have saved the information you can use it off-line to find what you need. It will save search information found, and highlight matching words. You can tell it to eliminate duplicate URL finds,
Thunderstone—http://www.thunderstone.com/. Not an in depth site, it did not find much at all. It also did not eliminate porn from its searches. It was listed in one of the megasearch engines so I thought I would take a look. They state, “It is very good at finding companies and organizations by purpose, product, subject matter, or location. If you’re trying to finding things like “Billy Bob’s personal beer can page on AOL”, try Inktomi or Altavista.”
List of terms to search for:
• Leukemia treatment STI 571 - latest drug
• Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Orange Coast College
• St Andrews Presbyterian Church - turns out this was the hardest one to find
• America Online - some do not want to list anything from AOL
• Sequoi(a) National Park - left the a off to see how it could handle a misspell
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