Web search utilities

Home Office Computing, March, 1998 by Hailey McKeefry

Whatever piece of information you need, chances are it's on the Web. But knowing that does little good if you can't put your hands on the data quickly and easily. In the wake of the Internet and the Web, free search engines have come to the rescue, bringing order to this vast electronic library and helping people find what they're looking for. Well, almost: Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and others let you enter search terms to perform on-line hunts, but the results differ wildly.

Instead of relying on a single search engine, why not use them all at the same time? With a Web search utility, you can hunt for information using multiple free search engines and view a report of each one's finding. In many ways, these utilities function much like the free-use Web search engines. Simply enter the search word or phrase (either in everyday language or in Boolean logic operators) and the utility surveys each Web search engine. In a few minutes, you're presented with the possible sites broken down and indexed by the different engines. And after the first search is finished, you can then drill down and probe the identified possibilities.

For this buyer's guide, we tested five Internet search utilities that run under Windows 95 (we couldn't find any Mac programs that fit the criteria) and cost between $20 and $50. With each product, we created real-world searches intended to gather information about starting a business, acquiring a small-business loan, joining a small-business association, and forming a subchapter S corporation.

Agentware Suite 2.0

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Of the five utilities that we reviewed, Agentware Suite was in many ways the most complex and feature-rich. Yet despite its sophistication, the program uses a cute canine metaphor that goes a long way toward finding information on the Web.

When we fired up Agentware for the first time, a welcome agent--in the form of a cartoon dog with wings and a halo--walked us through creating and using other agents (nonangelic dogs) that would perform our searches.

We trained an agent by typing a few search phrases in conversational language: "I want to find information about associations that cater to small businesses and entrepreneurs and financial institutions that offer small-business loans. Also anything to do with subchapter S corporations." Then, we started the search by dragging our dog, which we named Smallbus, onto the Web icon. The agent barked when it found a close match; good matches were listed with long bones; and semi-successful matches were marked with medium or short bones. The welcome agent also stuck around, floating in the upper right corner of our screen to dispense advice as we continued to work and cruise for information.

Unlike the other utilities we tested, Agentware searches indefinitely, moving from one site to another across the Web rather than accessing independent search engines. We allowed our agent to search the Web for one hour and 15 minutes--and the program came up with 82 sites and 903 pages. Of those, only four rated a long bone. These included the Enterprise Cooperative Development Department, a transcript entitled "The Role of Women in Business," an article called "Raising Money to Start Your Own Business," and inexplicably, a listing of law-enforcement sites on the Web.

Agentware is best suited for someone conducting long term research on a single topic or several in-depth topics, rather than the occasional down and dirty Web search. Once our search had begun, we refined it by commanding our four-legged friend to ignore certain words, phrases, and concepts. We also added successful searches (known as good hits) to the Agentware library, which you can search later by keyword. Finally, we had the option of using the Agentware Kennel to allow an agent to continue to search the Web while we were offline.

If you're a casual Web explorer who needs only quick searches, Agentware may be too much to handle. But if you need to perform systematic and thorough Web searches, Agentware and its hunting dogs will be your best friend indeed.

Subject Search Spider 1.02

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Subject Search Spider 1.02 (SSSpider) is probably the most straightforward of all the utilities we tested. Our search was completed in a swift four minutes, presenting us with the 25 best Web sites found in the course of the search. Along with a 1,000-word summary of each site, SSSpider was smart enough to remove all redundant sites before displaying the results.

To perform our search, we created a Query folder, which contained a variety of different topics that we could search individually. We typed our search query in real language, and SSSpider corrected our spelling errors and recognized phrases in different languages.

Among the top results were a New Mexico New Business Start Up Guide to Sub Chapter S Corporations as well as links to Incorporate USA, a business aimed at helping others incorporate, and NetEarnings, a small-business financial center. We were able to reset the number of locations visited (the default is 25), the time limit of the search (default 20 Minutes), the assurance rating (default 20 percent), and the length of the summary information (default 1,0000 words), among other parameters.