Still searching for a perfect match
The Internet is a great resource, but only if you can find the information you need. Search engines help, but your results may vary depending on which ones you use. Your best shot at finding what you’re looking for is a metasearch engine, software that can scour multiple Internet search sites at once.
After looking at two new metasearch engines and an upgraded version of one first reviewed in March (NW, March 31, page 61), we found they all suffer from awkward user interfaces and won’t provide explicit relevancy rankings. On the plus side, though, each works inside proxy servers.
Iconovex Corp. surprised us with the latest version of its EchoSearch, which rose from last in our previous review to first in this round on the strength of an improved interface and its ability to return more relevant data than the others. Prompt Software, Inc.’s WebSleuth includes good analysis capabilities but has rough edges. FerretSoft LLC’s NetFerret Suite has a basic Web search tool but comes with a handful of other useful Internet search aids. Were we rating additional tools, NetFerret would rank higher.
Upgraded score
While EchoSearch scored higher this time, it still has most of the limitations we saw before. For instance, you can search only six Web engines, and Yahoo and WebCrawler still are not among them. Plus there’s no way to limit the results returned by each engine, as there is with the other products.
But in addition to bringing back the most relevant hits, EchoSearch weeded out duplicates returned from different search engines. Results are displayed in three frames in a Web browser. While the new interface is an improvement, it still has a way to go. For example, if you want to specify a file full of links as a starting place for further searching, you must know the file location because there’s no way to browse your hard drive.
This ability to start a search using a file of previously found links is a huge plus because it lets you zero in on the most useful hits. You can, for example, gather all the hits for “LAN switching” into a file, then use the URLs from the hit list to revisit those sites and search for “latency.”
Another plus is you can schedule EchoSearch for a single run or daily runs at a specified time. EchoSearch also can perform Usenet searches, similar to NetFerret’s NewsFerret component, but it looks only in AltaVista’s Usenet archives.
On the data trail
Prompt Software’s Web-Sleuth stacks up well against EchoSearch, but its cumbersome user interface and limited ability to refine results hold it back. WebSleuth uses three unconnected windows, very much like EchoSearch’s three-frame browser display. The first, a Control Window, lets you specify search strings and add Boolean qualifiers.
You can view retrieved pages in the Preview Window or Web browser. Prompt Software has learned from the mistakes of other search software designers and uses only one instance of the browser to display selected pages. The Preview Window also can generate a textual abstract of a previewed page -handy for a quick scan. The Preview Window is less useful than it could be, however, because there’s no quick way to find your search phrase.
Lastly, the Information Window displays search results on five tabbed pages, the most important of which is the Contents page, where you can view relevant links. The Phrases and Words pages display an overwhelming alphabetic index of every phrase and word in all retrieved documents. To find your object, you have to wade through the list.
While this is useful, we’d really like to be able to refine a search by using all the links in the Contents page as the starting point for a new search. For example, if a search for “stackable hub” retrieved 500 pages, we’d like to be able to enter “cost of ownership” and generate a new, more focused, Contents page. You could then save the new Contents page as an HTML file and share it with others.
You can use a file full of URLs as the starting point for a search, but be careful not to include any extraneous words in the file because WebSleuth will think they are terms you want to search for.
WebSleuth also violates Windows 95 conventions by failing to allow you to paste a URL into the text box of its Control Window.
You can specify the number of references – between 10 and 100 – you want retrieved from each search engine. If you don’t find what you want, you can always go back and widen the search with another batch.
Searching is relatively fast, as you can have up to 15 agents – individual threads pursuing search engines – processing pages at once.
WebSleuth comes configured to access a reasonable number of search engines, including most of our favorites. However, Lycos is not among them, while Dogpile, a Web-based metasearch engine, inexplicably is. You can disable checks against included search engines, but you cannot add new ones.
WebSleuth suffers too from an inflated price tag, listing for $79.95, while the other two are only $29.95 each.
A Ferret family
Metasearch engines are fine for prying information out of Web sites. But if you’re also looking for e-mail addresses, phone numbers or Usenet news messages, FerretSoft has a suite of six search tools designed to find all that plus file and Internet relay chat (IRC) servers.
WebFerret, the freeware component most comparable to WebSleuth and EchoSearch, is distinctly low end. The software comes bundled with support for nine search engines, including all the ones we find useful, but you cannot add any on your own. You can, though, limit the number of hits it returns by search engine or in total.
While WebFerret brings back tons of links, it doesn’t eliminate duplicates. We typically found as many as four references to the same page returned by different search engines. WebFerret also has no way to limit the search to pages that do not contain a given search term.
If you’re going to pay for the suite, you’ll do so because of the other Ferrets it contains. EmailFerret searches multiple Inter-net white pages directories. Although it found two of our former e-mail addresses and two current ones, it could not tell which was which. To be fair, that’s because the directory listings themselves don’t contain that information. Double-clicking on an address brings up your e-mail client with an already addressed message form.
NewsFerret was our favorite Ferret. You specify a string that appears in a subject line and a string that appears in the name of any newsgroup and News-Ferret returns the results. Double-clicking on an article lets you view it. You can specify that you want to save multiple files to disk at once. But you must click a Save button for each one, which is most annoying.
PhoneFerret works the same way with telephone numbers. If Windows Telephony is properly set up, it will dial the number for you. FileFerret searches Shareware.Com, Archie servers and other resources to find files in File Transfer Protocol archives. We’d love to be able to search our own resources, but the program doesn’t let you add searchable entities. IRCFerret is a quick way to find someone by user ID, user information or host name on any of 16 popular IRC networks.
You can even specify keywords that must appear in the channel names a user is on. Clicking on their name takes you to the proper network and channel.
As these and the products in our previous review mature, we expect the vendors will fix the user interface problems and iron out other kinks. We look forward to testing the next generation.
Articles | Administrator | 
Monday, July 21, 1997 12:00 pm
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