BullsEye 2: A Powerful, Bot-Driven Search Tool

If there's anything more mind-boggling than the sheer volume of information available on the Internet, it's trying to find the specific information you need. 

IntelliSeek’s BullsEye 2 is an intelligent agent-driven software solution for those who must find useful information on the Web.  In addition to using intelligent agents, it combines the sophisticated search capabilities with a built-in browser so that you can quickly locate and review pertinent data. Best of all, it is downloadable for free from the IntelliSeek’s Web site.

While BullsEye has many features and it may take you a while to master them all, it eventually will begin to feel intuitive.  It organizes topics in common subject areas and it searches related sources, and allows you to adequately define and refine your searches.

BullsEye scans some 700 search engines, databases, and Web shopping sites. It offers 14 subject areas:  Web, news, shopping, multimedia, discussion, jobs, books, software, computers, business, references, health, entertainment, and college. Within each subject areas, you choose categories, which the program associates with Web sources.

If the built-in information sources don’t suffice, you can easily add sources from different categories.  For example, you could use the Washington Post as a source for entertainment news. However, we could find no way to remove a single source that we added. The only way to remove a single source was to click "reset," which erased all of our entries.

BullsEye's integrated browser, which is based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is a powerful addition that enables you to quickly view found pages after BullsEye finishes a search. BullsEye highlights the search terms within a site's text, which makes it easy to view a term's context and locate key paragraphs.

One of the things that makes BullsEye so useful are the wealth of its search options. As you would expect, you can enter key words in quotes and apply Boolean logic. The program also lets you search within items you found with a previous search, and you can save searches for future reference.

During our evaluation, we encountered almost no dead links, which is quite rare with tools that search  for obscure information on sites. That’s because BullsEye automatically analyzes links and identifies those that are dead or duplicates of others.   This capability is a real time-saver.

Overall, we felt that BullsEye was well designed and easy to use given the wealth of its features, which will take a while to learn.  We did feel, though, that the program's help menus could have offered more introductory information for novices.

It also isn't the best tool for shopping ― it just didn't compare to true shopping bots such as MySymon and StreetPrices. In particular, BullsEye doesn't always list prices with its results, offers fewer shopping categories, and doesn't provide pricing summaries - for example, a range of prices - as StreetPrices does.  

Generally, though, BullsEye 2 does an admirable job of locating facts, jobs, news stories, MP3 files, and more.  In fact, there are no other tools for end users that we’re aware of that do a better job of covering all those categories. 

This is a solid research tool and its integrated browser and text highlight features make it easy to evaluate hits.  If you regularly scour the Web for important information, BullsEye will be a big help and its price (free) is definitely right.