SEARCH BOTS
Little Known Services That Improve And Add To Your Search Engine Results
Compiled By Ralph Thomas

There are a host of services that improve your search results when it comes to searching on the net. These are generally known as SEARCH BOTS. These little services automate searching for you and give you the information you need through filters, update notifications, specialized searches and other specific enhancements to your web searching. Here is a list I have put togeather of services, most of which are completely free; that will help you search the net with better results.

TRACERLOCK
http://peacefire.org/tracerlock/
TracerLock can monitor search engines for you and notify you by e-mail when a new instance of a search term is found. For example, if you tell TracerLock to monitor search engines for the word "investigator," TracerLock will e-mail you when new pages appear on the web containing the word "investigator."

THE INFORMANT
http://informant.dartmouth.edu/
The Informant is a FREE! service that will save your favorite search engine queries and web sites, check them periodically, and send you email whenever there are new or updated web pages. It's quite useful and time saving.

DIRECT HIT
http://www.directhit.com
Direct Hit is unlike other search engines. It attempts to clear away all the useless links by analyzing the net traffic and giving you the most popular and relevant sites based on key word searching. Direct Hit also provides you with a dynamic topic list to help you refine your search.

ASK JEEVES
http://www.askjeeves.com/
ASk Jeeves is like human searching. You ask this search engine a question in plain-English and it attempts to provide you with the answer.

THE INVISIBLE WEB
http://www.intelliseek.com/
Intelliseek is something with it's invisible web search. It's a kind of search engine of search engines. There is a fee for the full edition but you can use the try it version.

DEJA NEWS
http://www.deja.com/
Deja lets you search for people's posts in usenet groups. Very useful when conducting background checks on anyone.

BOMIS
http://www.bomis.com/
Bomis is a massive web ring search directory. This is a good way to do a topic search since most web rings as so focused and usually finds pages not found with most search engine searches.

RING WORLD
http://www.webring.org/
Ring World is another web ring search engine that is quite useful.

FANCY SEARCHING ON ALTA VISTA
http://www.altavista.com/av/content/help.htm
Did you know you can perform fancy searches on the world's best search engine? Here's the type of power you can get. You can find out who and how many pages are linked to a specific web site. You can perform just a search of a specific web site. You can find pages on a specific computer. You can find pages that contain specific text. You can find pages that contain phrases in a page title and you can find pages that have specific words in a URL. Just follow the instructions at the above help page do conduct these fancy searches.

GREAT CUSTOMIZED NEWS FILTER BOTS

INFOBEAT
http://www.infobeat.com
Infobeat is a filtered new service in which you tell the service to send specific related news to your email address. Quite useful to keep up with what's going on.

FOX NEWS VIDEO
http://www.foxnews.com/video/
This place lets you customize your own news video program. It's like getting the news the way you want it with only the stories you want to watch.