*Update* Just Use Google! (Copernic 2000)

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	Copernic 2000
Date:	08/08/01 (412 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see review

Disadvantages: see review

Copernic 2001 is a highly acclaimed searching tool which is free to download to your system. It is effectively another search engine, but which performs a meta-search across a vast number of search engines to find the best and most relevant result to your search. In this way, Copernic should find even the most obscure information on the web - if its out there, Copernic hould find it!

Surely something which claims to be this wonderful ought to be quite costly? Well, yes and no. There are 3 versions of the software - the free version, plus version and pro version. The free version allows you to search upto 80 search engines with one search criteria at a time and only gives you 9 specialist categories to seacrh in, whils tthe two you pay for have 1000 search engines, more specialised categories and lots of extra bit which I never paid much attention to. Why not? Well, basically because the free version is good enough for me not to even have to consider the other two versions which come in at around $40 and $80 respectively.

Copernic 2001 must be download from www.copernic.com before you can use it. The download is painless, with the program being around 2.5Mb in size and the installation relatively easy despite the heap of dumb questions it asks and the 'invitation' to register your copy. Once installed though you are ready to roll...or rather are presented with rather a daunting interface. Well daunting it may look, but difficult to use it ain't. The program loads up looking like a modified version of your browser, with the search box at th etop, some buttons, very menu options, a list of specific browsing sections on the left and a large returned results area on the right. I'm not going to go into every aspect of the program becuase that would be a waste of my time to write and yours to read. The main points to note are...

Using Copernic is very simply despite the original look of the program. You can start searching straigh
t away by entering a search criteria in the search box and hitting enter. Copernic will search through a bunch of search engines including Alta Vista, Yahoo!, Google...the biggies and return the top ten most relelvant results from these. If ten can't be found then it will return those it can...if more than 10 are then it returns the most relevant. These are displayed in the largest section of the screen along with the usual info etc. Each search you do on Copernic is recorded and saved in a list just below the taskbar. This means that you never 'lose' found pages because all you need to do is click on the saved search and all the result will be reshown in an instance...great! But not very private, but then you also have the option to delete indiviual ones as well. To view a page you double click on the result and are taken to the page to view. One problem I did have with this was that there were a lot of dead pages...but then I suppose this porgram is only as good as the search engines it searches. If they have outdated pages and broken links then so does this...

In order to make your searches more relevant there are the special sections I mentioned, which allow you to search in a particular category - for example Books...or UK only which I find most useful. These are very limited in the free version...but then you get what you pay for. ;o) The accuracy of the returned results varies, but this is easily the most powerful tool I have found for searching for academic related documents which are often hard to find using conventional search engines. If the more useless results are found higher up the listings in the search engines you are looking at then you will get the more useless results returned here. Search using a conventional search engine and you can browse deeper for better results, but not here as only the best ten are returned for each. You can set this to look deeper though through the options should you so wish.

Overall I lik
e this program a lot, but I think I will only use it for searching for things I find difficult to find on somewhere like google. Copernic returns a lot of results which it ranks for relevancy, but then the relevancy is often not brilliant in my opinion. By searching search engines like Lycos it uses search engines which I DO NOT like at all and returns results from them - generally useless to my needs. Therefore no matter how relevant it says the reults are, they generally are not until you find things returned by Google, or ALta Vista for example - not ideal, because you end up sorting through the chaff to find these. Admittedly you can choose which ones are searched but by doing so you cut down the 80 search engines to a much lower number...

OK, I am grumbling now and I shouldn't because this program does return excellent result and I do use it a lot for difficult to find information. Its will probably not be your search engine of choice, for general searching because it just feels TOO powerful if that makes sense, but is certainly something I would recommend having at hand to everyone. Download a copy today, if not sooner and see just how good it is. It is also very stable and there are a number of features such as skins, etc. which i have not even touched on for you to find out about. A great piece of software which I wold recommend to everyone, but which has all of the problems inherent in search engines still...oh well, nothing is perfect..


**UPDATE**

Hmm, well I take most of my recommendations back seeing as the free version now comes packed with various bits of spyware such as Flycast apparently. I'm also tending to find Google to be absolutely awesome these days and therefore its not really necessary to download something new onto your system to search other less useful search engines. Copernic is a good toy, but when Google is this excellent that's all it is - a toy...and one which spies on you too.

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