Product Reviews

Mention 'web search' and people will probably assume you mean Google. There's more to searching though, and DEVONagent from Devon Technologies claims to provide a more productive way to track down online information than you'll get in today's web-based interfaces.

DEVONagent is a standalone application that runs searches using many different search sources, processes the results to improve what you get, and helps you explore the end result in a number of useful ways. For example, you can run queries just plain or pick tailored 'search sets' to have your searches focused on particular areas and formed in specific ways.

The application shows search results in a scrolling section of the main window as a set of digests and as pages, with the text formatted consistently according to your preferences. The Pages display shows a relevance-sorted list of found pages. Click on one and its text contents are shown, cleanly formatted, in the lower panel, with examples of your search words highlighted. This is ordinary stuff, but we were impressed at the relevance of its results with entirely untailored queries.

DEVONagent streams the results it gets back, discarding spam and errors before retrieving the actual text content of the found pages. You can also use post-processing 'scanner' settings to filter out results that don't match particular further criteria - for example, only pages with linked audio files. All this work means its search speed is a little slower than a traditional search engine, but the results appear to be the most comprehensive and relevant we've seen.

What makes this utility

When you've found pages you want to refer to later, you can copy their contents directly from within the application, add them to DEVONagent's searchable archive, or save them as files on disk to open later, in text, HTML or RTFD format.

DEVONagent does well just by running regular searches, but you can get even more from it using its search operators to fine-tune how your searches behave. Basic operators such as AND and OR work in most search engines, but DEVONagent adds BEFORE, AFTER and a configurable NEAR, lets you use parentheses to group parts of your search terms, and more. This sounds complex, and when you try find DEVONagent's boundaries, you'll need to work out the logic of some of your search structures. However, this software is actually very easy to put to work.

In a nice touch, you also get a Dashboard Widget so you can run searches almost at the click of a button.

A fly in the ointment occurred when we used DEVONagent to track back to a particular page in its logs. An alert about a JavaScript problem appeared and advised us to let it install WinFixer 2006. Although this is free, it isn't designed for Macs. Nowhere else was there any Windows bias, so we'll take this as an isolated bug.

DEVONagent is good if you want more from searching than the linear approach, and will be invaluable for anyone doing any kind of serious research.