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Posted on 23 Mar 2005 at 13:39

Davey Winder proves he knows his RSS from his elbow, turns digital detective and discovers new ways to find and search for data

As an alternative, you might want to try Amazon, or rather its A9 search engine (www.a9.com), which has a book-search feature and a better interface for searching inside those books and viewing covers, contents and excerpts. My rather random testing suggested that currently Amazon has a larger index of books to reference, not surprisingly, than Google. Similarly, when it comes to articles (of the magazine and periodical variety), I recommend going to LookSmart FindArticles (www.findarticles.com), where there are more than five million full-text and free articles to search through, covering some 900 magazines and journals dating back to 1998. There are also links to premium content, which point to articles that need to be purchased, but even then this works out a lot cheaper than subscribing to the online version of the publication, assuming there is such a subscription available in the first place.

A toad well travelled

Another interesting idea on the search engine front comes courtesy of MrSapo (www.mrsapo.com), which offers a twist on the usual meta-search genre. Instead of bringing the results from multiple search sites into one results index, as is the norm, MrSapo is perhaps best described as being a meta-interface site. You get a single search box and the one search site, with buttons that enable you to perform your search at any of the many choices available, but only one at a time. This may sound like something of a backwards step when compared to a meta-search site, but it works very well. The trouble with meta-searching is that, more often than not, you are faced with information overload and no choice about the search engines being used (which will be determined by partnership agreements and business deals rather than user convenience).

I'm sure many of you will have visited one meta-search site after another to reach the spread of engines you really wanted to search. One way to get around this is to use a product such as Copernic Agent (www.copernic.com), which lets you specify which of the hundreds of search sites listed you want to include in any given meta search. It also lets you create specific search-site sets for different applications and index their results in any number of ways. Unfortunately, this is a rather expensive solution for any but the professional researcher, although it is wonderfully efficient and is used here at the Happy Geek offices on a daily basis. This is where MrSapo comes in, offering a much wider range of search sites that cover audio, video, RSS and blog searches all at the press of a button and all returned on the same page. You only need enter the search terms once, which makes re-submission at multiple sites a breeze. With big names like Google, Yahoo! and MSN included alongside the less well-known but equally useful Clusty, Snap and Vivisimo, to name but a few, it is certainly one to look at.