Parlez-vous Internet?

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:35

If you can't speak the Net lingo, don't worry, as Davey Winder has all the answers - in good old plain English.

Every month I'll be featuring just one Web site, but it will be a good one, and it will be either be recommended or operated by PC Pro readers. So drop me an email and I'll certainly pop along and visit your site. If it's good enough I'll make it my site of the month and your hit counter will explode.

Yahoo Scoot - UK Business Directory

http://scoot.yahoo.co.uk

Not, I grant you, the most visually attractive site on the Web, but proof enough that at the end of the day information delivery is actually more important than slapping every Java bell or RealAudio whistle onto the page. Scoot is the result of a collaboration between Yahoo UK and the well-established 'real-world' business directory service Freepages. Essentially, you enter the type of business or tradesman you're looking for and the geographic location required, and Scoot returns a list of businesses that match and are within a 20-mile radius. There are no graphics-heavy pages getting in the way of the information, just a simple list of the matches. Some have links to a 'further information' page which contains a more detailed assessment of the business, but that's as far as the embellishments go.

It works really well; I should know, as I've actually used it in an emergency and it came up trumps. The search engine technology underlying the database is clever enough to identify most requirements thrown at it, and the user is given a choice of exact business types to choose from based on the original enquiry.

To save even more time you can enter an exact postcode in the location box instead of an area. I've found that this returns a more precise match in pretty short order. Although business directories are nothing new, Scoot manages to do the job in a refreshingly straightforward manner and it actually works, which is good enough for me. Good enough in fact for Scoot to join RailTrack as the two main sites I show to folk to demonstrate that the Web does have real-world uses. Oh, and you can add your business to the databases by completing a very short on-line form - and it's free of charge.

Wavey's hot tip

Have you got an essential on-line shortcut or problem solver that you want to share? If so, why not email me and let me know about it and I'll share the most useful ones here.

BJ DaVinci wrote to say that software packages that make their own cache to enable you to browse the Web off-line have been eliminated thanks to the built-in off-line browsing support of Internet Explorer 4. Although he has a point, IE 4's Web OLR is basic to say the least, but if you've visited a site you can easily browse it again without the ISP connection up and running and your cash ticking away. Over to BJ for the way how:

'Just tick File/Work Offline in IE 4, then go into View/Internet Options/General/Temporary Internet Files/Settings/View Files and click away and you're laughing. As long as you've got Work Offline ticked you can do the same thing even easier by opening up the History Frame (click History on Taskbar) or alternatively you can keep a shortcut to the Temporary Internet Files folder on your Desktop and click or drag and drop a cached file into IE 4.'

The Wavey line

Finding a way to beat the World Wide Wait has become something of a Grail quest for Internet users and developers alike. How many times have you discovered an interesting link and given up waiting for the connection to that particular server or had to stop a slow download of information because it's taking too long? While new infrastructure technologies like Project Oxygen (mentioned here last month) offer hope of a bandwidth bonanza for the future that will blow away the blues, right now it's slow going - which brings me nicely on to the immediate solution to the problem: cacheing.

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