|
Best of the Bots Fine-Tune Your Own Search Engine By Don Barker
For some time, predictions have been made that intelligent agents would provide the
next level in the evolutionary ladder of Web navigation. Acting autonomously, these smart
programs are suppose to automatically find, BullsEye uses a collection of custom intelligent agents, tapping over
300 search engines and 600 plus databases on the Internet, to find, analyze, BullsEye lets you access and control its collection of agents with an easy-to-use interface called the BullsEye Manager, as shown in Figure 1. The left-hand menu in the BullsEye Manager lets you choose the agent best-suited to find the information you want while the upper-right pane displays searchable subcategories for the agent and the lower-right pane provides general details about the agent. For example, selecting the NewsFinder agent displays the subcategories: General News, Business News, and Computing News, with further topics below each of these, as illustrated in Figure 2. Clicking a topic, like "Searching Computing News," opens the Web Query dialog box, as pictured in Figure 3. Web Query is divided into three sections: Select a Category, Enter keywords, and Result Quality. You can change the pre-selected search category with drop-down list box and the Configure button opens another dialog box for specifying which search engines and sources BullsEye queries, as displayed in Figure 4. The keyword section of Web Query has options to search based on ALL or ANY of the terms you enter as keywords. In addition, you can elect to construct a POWER query that uses Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT), and proximity operators (e.g. NEAR), to narrow the scope of your search. There is even a Query Wizard to walk you through constructing a Boolean search. Buttons in the keyword section also provide help with spelling, a Thesaurus, and sound alike terms. The Result Quality section of the Web Query dialog provides two check box options. The first, Eliminate Bad Links, causes BullsEye to verify and present only hits with working URLs. Selecting the second option, Retrieve and Analyze Web Pages, tells BullsEye to actually download the text from matching documents and analyze it, as shown in Figure 5. Using award winning technology from VerityÔ , BullsEye ranks documents by relevance, produces document highlights, meaningful summaries, and eliminates duplicate pages. This analysis makes it much easier to rapidly find the information you need. In addition, the option lets you browse offline, instantaneously refine searches, create searchable word indices and research offline. To further refine the quality of search results, BullsEye provides a Filter dialog, as shown in Figure 6. This dialog has three tabs: Site, Page, and Duplicates. The Site pane excludes site types (e.g., .org and .gov), countries (e.g., .jp and .uk), and even specific URL substrings (e.g., sex or drugs). The Page pane specifies cutoffs for date and file size while the Duplicates pane eliminates mirrored copies of the same pages from multiple servers within the same domain as well as documents with duplicate content. Once you have entered your keywords and set the search parameters in the Web Query dialog, BullsEye goes to work intelligently scouring the Net. It displays the hits in a Search Results window, as illustrated in Figure 7. The Search Results window organizes hits into a table based on their Rank (relevance to query as provided by the search engines). However, you can easily rearrange the results by clicking on another column heading such as Title, Search Engine, URL, Date, and Size. To view a hit, double-click it in the results list. Your default Web browser launches and automatically loads the selected page. To explore another hit, switch to the Search Results window and double-click on a different listing. The new page will load in the already open browser window. The Search Results window offers many other important information tools. As Sundar Kadayam, co-founder and CTO of IntelliSeek, points out "You can click the ‘Verify’ button to eliminate bad links, or the ‘Analyze' button to retrieve and analyze the text content of each hit. Multiple visualization aids are provided to view your search results from different perspectives -- the Site view groups the results list by site type and country, and the Concept view classifies documents with similar content into groups. You can save a query for later use. You can also generate highly insightful, customized reports in HTML or text formats, which you can save for future reference or share with co-workers via the built-in email support." BullsEye comes with some excellent features for managing previously saved queries and reports. And, as an added bonus, BullsEye offers a very simple drag and drop method for copying Bookmarks and Favorites back and forth between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. All of these options are accessible from the Resources and Reports tabs in BullsEye Manager. The Professional version of BullsEye comes with a tracking utility that lets you schedule autonomous searches and intelligent reports based on previous queries, bookmarks, and favorites. The BullsEye Tracker can either alert you about updates or, for road warriors, email them to you -- there is even a pager option for alerts! "By combining automated background searches and Web page lookups for relevant information, with sophisticated change detection, the Tracker delivers new and relevant information in all your interest areas with no ongoing effort on your part," Sundar explains. As a consequence, the BullsEye Tracker saves you an enormous amount of time – valuable time, which is no doubt better spent in gaining an advantage over your competition. According to Sundar, "BullsEye is the first integrated application that combines the important functions of search, manage, analyze, report, track and alert to reduce information overload. BullsEye defies categorization as a meta-search tool...[it] is in a league of its own." In other words, if you consider the browser a dinosaur on the evolutionary ladder of Web navigation, then BullsEye is a bird, letting you soar above the chaotic and crowded world of cyberspace.
|
|
|
In the beginning, all you needed to navigate the Web was a browser. Then, as the number
of pages (and sites) grew, search engines became necessary to locate the information you
wanted. Now the Web has grown so large (
analyze, filter, and present you with information as needed. Although many
intelligent agents have been developed to help reduce information overload,
the highly diverse nature of the Internet makes it impossible for any one software agent
to accomplish the task. Fortunately, digital evolution has just gotten a kick in the pants
by a product called BullsEye from IntelliSeek (
filter, report, manage, and track
information. Rather than relying on a single agent technology, BullsEye uses a group of
intelligent agents to accurately locate Web content, news, people, books, software,
businesses, colleges, FAQs, and health answers. And, according to the CEO of IntelliSeek,
Mahendra Vora, this current group of agents is just the beginning. Future versions of
BullsEye will include even more agents designed to locate other specialized forms of data
on the Net.
