The Internet Hotel
Did You Want To Narrow Your Search or Expand It?
A Review of WebSeeker
by Craig Majaski
Searching the internet has become more of a task these days. There are more sites popping up everyday. Most people tend to search the internet via online engines like YAHOO, WebCrawler, or InfoSeek. All of these search engines probably give you more than enough sites to browse through in order to track down the information you're looking for. WebSeeker, by ForeFront, is the latest product that is supposed to help you find information on the internet faster and easier. How does it fare against other products, such as WebCompass and FastFind, though? And, is it really better than the services you're currently using?
Operating WebSeeker is easy enough. You begin your search by simply typing in the word or words that you're searching for. Next, you pick which type of search you want it to perform. InstantFind is the fastest search available. It's supposed to remove duplicate site listings, but that often isn't the case. The next option is to use CleanFind. This will take a little longer to retrieve all the sites, but it also removes unavailable sites from the listing. The final search tool is FilterFind. This mode takes the longest of the three. It does all the things the other two do, but also indexes the results for easier navigation. Depending on how detailed you want your searches, and how much time you've got on your hands, you pick the mode that's right for you. These modes can be changed every time you begin a new search, so you're never locked into a single one.
After you've entered in the words and the search mode, the program goes to work. The single most impressive feature of WebSeeker is its ability to utilize over twenty search engines at once. By comparison, WebCompass only uses eleven and FastFind only makes use of eight search engines. Since the program uses so many search engines, the chances of having more sites found is obviously increased. If you're searching for a topic or word that you haven't had luck finding in the past, then this is the program that will probably have the best chance at locating the information. Not only can the program find the sites you're looking for, but it can also monitor them and notify you if the site has been updated since your last search attempt. You may also reject any sites that you no longer want to appear when you do your searching. One other nice feature is that you are able to save your results as a web page to your hard disk so you can go back and visit other sites in your list at another time.
There are problems with using WebSeeker though. Depending on your connection speed to the internet, you may have a long wait ahead of you whenever you try to search for a word. Since the program uses so many search engines, the time it can take for all the results to be posted can be phenomenal. I've had some searches take as little as a minute while others took up to an hour, and I'm directly connected to the internet. Usually if the search looks like it's going to take a really long time, it's best to start over with more specific keywords. For example, say you wanted to find some web sites that contain information on games reviewed at WorldVillage. It would be best to type in ôGamer's Zoneö and ôWorldVillageö to narrow the search and also to save time. The more vague the keywords, the longer the search will take. When I put the keyword ôWorldVillageö into WebSeeker, it took approximately ten minutes to display all the sites. By comparison, YAHOO brought up the corresponding sites in about twenty seconds. Conversely, when I used my last name as a keyword for WebSeeker, it took under a minute to list all the matches (since there aren't as many sites with my name on it as there are with WorldVillage).
Another problem that exists with a program like this is that instead of narrowing your search to specific sites, it actually expands it. This can be good or bad, depending on how broad the topic is that you're searching. I once again threw ôWorldVillageö into the program to see how many sites it would find. After waiting for awhile, I was deluged with 481 different references to WorldVillage, and that's using Filter Find! By comparison, YAHOO turned up only 68 matches. The question you have to ask yourself is, which search engine is actually faster and easier to find pertinent information?
Overall, WebSeeker does what it's supposed to do. It finds as many sites as possible that pertain to your keywords. I still prefer using online search engines since they don't usually give an overload of information. If you've been having troubles locating web pages pertaining to your interests, or find that the online search engines just don't find the information you're looking for, then this product would be worthy of your purchase. It's a definite improvement over WebCompass, but I'm not sure how it fares next to FastFind since I've never used that product. If you need the most comprehensive web searching available, I highly recommend WebSeeker.
Internet Hotel Scorecard
| Product: | WebSeeker |
| Company: | Forefront Group, Inc. |
| Cost: | $49.99 |
System Requirements:
486 or better with 8 MB of RAM, 10 MB Hard Disk Space,
Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.5 or higher, Web Browser,
Winsock-compliant network product,
an internet connection with SLIP, PPP, or direct connection.
This Reviewer used:
Pentium 200 MHz Processor, 32 MB RAM, Windows 95,
Microsoft Explorer, and a direct connection to the internet.
Breakdown:
Ease of Use 4
Quality 4
Concept 2
Interface 3
Overall Score:
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