Internet FastFind

A filter for the information ocean

The Internet is a grand resource, butit's a vast ocean of disorganized data; search sites like AltaVista, Magellan,and Yahoo! are essential for finding specific information. Yet, even casting anintelligent net retrieves thousands of dubious hits, and you must often fish onmany sites.

Symantec's Internet FastFind (IFF) is among the first meta-search products(Quarterdeck's WebCompass is another), and other companies are hard on itsheels. Meta-search tools query many search engines at once, remove duplicatehits, and organize the results.

Other Bundled Modules
IFF includes other Internet tools. A nice one is LiveUpdate, Symantec's newstandard automatic product updater. When I first ran IFF, LiveUpdateautomatically retrieved IFF 1.0a, which added the HotBot search site and updatedsome features. Another tool is PatchConnect, which retrieves system driverupdates from company Web sites.

Other tools are EasyFTP, a Windows FileFind, for finding particular filesin Archie/FTP space; EasyZIP, which incorporates zip and unzip features intoExplorer; and WebLaunch, which puts program-access icons for all these tools onthe Windows taskbar.

Testing and Usage
IFF installed quickly from its CD-ROM, registered the program via theInternet, and displayed the IFF console. Two clicks later, I was searching for "OpenGLvideo cards"; I watched as IFF submitted the search across the variousengines. By default, the program organizes the results by site name and savesthe summary as an HTML document. You can peruse the document in your default Webbrowser.

The search respondents' speed limits the speed of IFF; if you want to waitfor more hits to download, IFF has a button to add 30 more seconds per clickonce IFF starts. Sorting the retrieved hits for display takes less than a minuteon a 120MHz Pentium. Too often, hits you want to visit are unavailable; IFFoffers the option of eliminating unavailable sites that it finds.

Limitations
  IFF has several search limitations. It will retrieve only 250 hits persearch engine--a serious limitation when AltaVista can generate thousands. IFFwon't add secondary or refined searches to existing lists; you must restart eachsearch. And IFF won't search Usenet (net news) space. EasyFTP doesn't supportresumable FTP, a process that continues a file transfer after a break.

A Good Start
To stay competitive, Symantec will have to add more local intelligence tothe program to make its seine net both finer and wider. But as a first release,IFF is immediately useful to many people, whether computer professionals orregular users, for expanding their Internet searches.