Bot News
Copernic Shopper

By Brian Proffitt

While he was hanging out with some friends in Rome in 1513, Polish mathmatician Nicolaus Copernicus first came up with the idea that perhaps the Earth wasn't the center of the known universe. Maybe the Sun was.

It was just a short idea, not really fully developed. It would take Copernicus another 30 years to flesh out the details of the theorem. It is said that he recieved the first printed copy of On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres while lying on his deathbed.

It would take another hundred or so years before the theory was widely accepted, but eventually the people of Earth had to reconcile the fact that it was the Sun which was the center of the universe, not their little blue and green planet. Today, New Yorkers still have a problem coping with this, but that's another story.

Copernic Technologies, then, is an aptly named company, for it is the designer of tools designed to move the center of power for searches from the Internet to your PC desktop. It has already done so with the Copernic 2000 search bot, and now it is beta testing a new tool for the bargain hunters amongst us: Copernic Shopper.

Shopper is a shopping bot that you can download from the Copernic site and install on your computer in a short amount of time, even if you have dial-up access. Now in its second beta release, Shopper's installation file is just shy of 3 Mb.

Shopper's setup was simple, and before the program starts up its initial run, it asks a number of questions about the user's identity, location, and currency.

Even though Shopper is a stand-alone application, one of its nicest features is the integration with Internet Explorer browser engine to display Web pages of the items you find. It also can show the progress of a price or review search if you want it to.

There were a couple of shortcomings, however. For one, this is a Windows only application, and needs IE 4.0 or higher. Netscape and alternate browser users are out of luck for now, as are Mac and Linux users.

Also, the choice of which commerce sites that get searched seems to be hardwired into the code for now. There is a feature where you can suggest commerce sites to be added to the searches, and presumably these would get added into later releases.

In all, Shopper is a handy little tool to use if you prefer to launch searches from your own desktop rather than a Web server.