WebCompass for Windows 95

WebCompass is a 'Universal Query' agent that will search many of the most popular search engines on the 'net with a single command -- all you have to do is type in a topic and WebCompass does the rest. In addition to searching multiple sites, WebCompass will automatically eliminate duplicate results, publish the findings of your search in an informative report (with individual summaries), and keep an eye out for updates. WebCompass comes pre-configured with more than twenty different search engines, including Yahoo, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Lycos, and Excite, as well as engines that deal with specialized topics like sports, business (investments), technology, media, and the Internet. If you find that one of your favorite search engines is missing (Magellan for example), don't worry -- adding an engine is a quick and easy task with WebCompass. Seamless integration with your favorite web browser is also provided in order for you to access the contents of a search result simply by clicking on it. This personal research assistant does take a while to search each engine, but overall, it's much faster than contacting and searching each engine individually. Plus, WebCompass adds value to your searches by providing 'on the fly' summaries of web pages. Another value-added service results from the way WebCompass continues to handle your search after the initial results have been returned. Your search results can be organized by content, relevancy, date, search engine, number of links, and more. In addition, you can delete irrelevant pages or modify outdated results before saving the topic. You can then have WebCompass come in at a later time and check for updates to the pages included in the search results as well as check the search engines for new pages that match the topic. All in all, if you do a lot of web searching, WebCompass is a great application to have. It will speed up your searches, provide you with critical summaries of matching sites, and even update the results upon your request. What more could you ask for in a web search agent? Pros: Easy to use, searches multiple engines to find web sites, efficient processing of search results Cons: Only as reliable as the search engines that it contacts, relatively slow Version Reviewed: 2.0 Beta 1 Date of Review: 10/2/96 For the latest information on WebCompass, check out http://www.stroud.com/95agents.html#webcomp

I'm puzzled, and maybe I'm missing something, but it appears that unlike the search engines themselves, WebCompass doesn't seem to permit entering multiple search terms with AND, or with NEAR (or equivalents) or to filter results by such criteria. All multiword searches appear to only behave as if they were written as "word1 OR word2 OR ... wordn", making it somewhat of a chore to filter out the results returned. For instance, in searching for references to my company name, "Business Visions, Inc." I would like to be able to enter the search string surrounded by double quotes and have the actual search engines ONLY return results in which the three words were adjacent and in the indicated order. Lycos and Infoseek permit such a thing, and for engines that don't, WebCompass should filter the results for me. It *is* however an almost mitigating convenience to only have to enter the search ONCE and get results from all those search engines ...