By Steve Anderson
If you have spent any time on the Internet you have learned what a blessing and a curse it can be. It's a blessing because of the tremendous amount of information available to you. And it's a curse because of the tremendous amount of information available to you. The Web is like a library that is growing every hour, but doesn't have a card catalog to help you find what you need when you need it.
The information on the Internet will only become useful when you have a way to find just the information you need when you need it. Most people go to one of the many Internet search engines available as a place to start. When we search for "insurance" on Alta-Vista, we receive over 20,000 "hits" or possible matches which contain some reference to the word "insurance." With that many matches most people simply give up the search.
Even if you can narrow the search to find the information you are looking for, you have to go to several search sites such as Yahoo, Alta-Vista or Lycos and type in a few search words. You then have to redo the same process for each site. This is a waste of time.
You have just gotten a glimpse of a major limitation of search "engines" for the World Wide Web. As helpful as they are, these sites are far from perfect.
Optimists, or the unstable, might think it's possible to try and impose order on the Web. Well, it can happen with a new type of software on the market. I've used WebCompass 2.0 for a number of months and it has transformed the Web into a personalized, well-organized, automatically updated database of information. Although you'll need to take some time to learn how to use it, it is well worth the effort. I am currently using the beta version 2.0; the final product should be shipping by the time you read this.
What does WebCompass do?
WebCompass is a new type of software that acts like a master search facility or "universal query" engine to allow you to intelligently search the Web and retrieve just the information you need.
WebCompass comes with 26 of the most popular Web-based search engines listed in an internal database. You can add more as you find them. When you want to search for a topic, WebCompass forages through these multiple search engines for information that meets the criteria you established using key topics, words or phrases. You don't always have to start from scratch. The software comes with a database of more than 40,000 pre-defined hyperlinked topics and categories, or you can use the New Topic Wizard to set up a new subject area. Naturally, you'll need a bit of time to learn how to set up all the categories you want.
When you run a search, the WebCompass Agent generates summaries--lists of Web pages, newsgroup articles, files, and other items of interest--and arranges them in an index organized by topic and subtopic. But, it does a lot more. WebCompass actually goes out and loads the Web page that the search found and summarizes the page for you. The abstract is included in the database, so as you look through the list of sites you can actually read a one-paragraph abstract of the information found at that site.
You read the summaries and double-click on the sites you want to explore. Then the package loads your browser and goes out to fetch the full page of information. This saves time and bandwidth because you spend your time downloading and looking at only what you really want.
Does it really work?
Here are two examples of how we were able to save a huge amount of time by using this software.
My daughter, Stephanie, is in the 6th grade and recently was assigned a major science project on tornados. As any good parent would, I was helping her find the information she needed to write the report. We looked in all the traditional places and didn't find that much useful material. We decided to look on the Internet using WebCompass. Using the search term "tornados," we let WebCompass do its work. It came back with 56 hits. As we looked through and read the abstracts for each of the individual sites, we were able to pick the sites we wanted to go to and did so by simply double-clicking on the address.
There were about four sites that contained some really good information along with pictures which she was able to print out and use in her report. The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Who knows how many hours it would have taken to do this research the traditional way? (She received an "A" on the project.)
A more business-related example involves the research I do for this column. All of the topics I write about involve how agents can use new technology in a practical way to help them make more money. This means I'm always looking at what is new. This involves searching for information on what is new and how others are using it. WebCompass keeps track of all the topics I'm interested in and updates them weekly for me. When I write a column, the background information is readily available and up-to-date.
There have been a number of times when I didn't have the home page address for a company to obtain additional information. Using WebCompass I searched for the URL using the company name and in a matter of minutes was able to go directly to that company's home page.
WebCompass has become an indispensable tool which I use to keep track of a large volume of constantly changing information on the Internet. This program takes important steps toward making the Internet a more useful business tool.
WebCompass version 2.0 is available from Quarterdeck Corp., Marina del Rey, CA. Price: $49.95; Phone: 800-354-3222; (310) 309-3700; Internet URL: www.quarterdeck.com
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The author
Steve Anderson is a producer at Cadenhead Shreffler Insurance in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He also heads American Insurance Consultants (AIC) which provides consulting services on how to maximize profits using common sense technology. He is a member of the TAAR network and can be reached at 800-657-6181 or by e-mail at:
steveanderson@compuserve.com. To obtain additional information by fax on the topic discussed in this article, call InsurFax, AIC's fax-on-demand system, at (817) 589-4530, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.