Welcome to the Machine: The Quest for Stuff

Welcome to Gearhead, a new weekly column providing an inside look at technologies, standards, protocols and products.

The plan is to cover a technology one week and a product or service the next. And we reserve the right to occasionally throw in a curveball, such as an interview with a technical pundit when we find someone really interesting. So, on with the show.

This week's topic concerns that one online activity we spend an inordinate amount of time on - trying to find stuff. The reason is there are so many tools to use and they all offer different strategies for searching.

To get an idea of the number of search engines out there, check out the Yahoo search engine list at dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet /Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Search_ Engines.

We also now have metasearch engines, such as Metacrawler, that search other search engines, and even engines that search for images.

But searching is still pretty time-consuming and often frustrating, unless you just happen to find the right tool. A number of vendors have produced personal metasearch engines, but they have proven only marginally useful. In this area, how-ever, BullsEye, a personal search engine from IntelliSeek, Inc., of Cincinnati (www.intelliseek.com), breaks new ground.

BullsEye can search more than 300 search engines and databases. But it is not just the scope of searching that makes this an impressive product, it is the analysis of the results that clinches it.

BullsEye retrieves search results from the search engines, retrieves pages they cite, analyzes the page content, removes the dead links and presents a report. And when I say "presents," I mean it can display the report in a browser window, e-mail the report to one or more people, or send a message to your pager. Even better, BullsEye can examine the last report it created for a particular search and only report on newfound results.

BullsEye is divided into four main sections. First is the BullsEye Manager. In the Manager, you can define and run searches (which can be saved for reuse), organize reports, and analyze and refine search results offline.

Next come the Intelligent Search Agents, which categorize the search engines so that you can restrict a site to just the news sources or Web sites that have been reviewed.

Third comes the Rapid Information Discover Engine, which determines the relevance ranking of documents, removes duplicates and dead links, and summarizes the content.

And finally, there's the Information Tracker, only available in the BullsEye Pro version. Tracker allows you to schedule searches and monitor Web pages for changes.

I think this is perhaps the best search tool I have seen and, from a corporate or departmental viewpoint, it has tremendous potential. You can schedule searches and send the results to a group on a regular basis.

And if you're willing to do a little exploring and HTML editing, you can modify BullsEye's report templates to customize the presentation for your organization (exactly how is an exercise left for the reader).

I'm waiting for IntelliSeek to produce a centralized enterprise version that can accept search requests via e-mail or through a Web form, and provide more sophisticated storage management (particularly the purging of old reports).

This product is fast, reliable and amazingly effective, and it costs only $37 for the basic version and $112 for the pro version! I highly recommend BullsEye, which gets a rating of 4.5 gear teeth out of a possible five.

Comments and suggestions to gh@gibbs.com. Resource list at www.gibbs.com/gearhead/links/9901.