14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet is a big place, and that's a blatant understatement. The fact that it keeps growing at a huge speed is not helping either. With so much information out there, although granted much of it is redundant, it takes many human lifetimes to go through it all. Now, the Internet is highly regarded as a great source of information, so, naturally, there are many people who want to find what they are looking for, regardless of how obscure or common that information is.
The problem that arises is that most newcomers, especially those that are not very computer savvy have a hard time handling complex web pages, let alone finding pieces of information. Those of us that have been with the Internet since the days of the BBS scoff and fail to see the difficulty, after all, the Net today is many times easier to use then it first was, however, for many newcomers, the intricacies of search engines are unknown, and many searches yield tens of pages of useless results that a novice will find hard to sift through in order to get to the relevant results.
Fortunately, there are pieces of software out there that are designed to make finding things on the Internet much easier, such as Sinbad.
What it does
Sinbad is the software version of a librarian in a library. It is the one place to stop and find anything you are looking for, without having to do the hard lifting yourself. Once you tell it what kind of information you are looking for, it will automatically search on the most relevant search engines for that type of information and return the results as a webpage, which you can see directly from within it.
For anyone who is at home on the web, this program offers little to no advantages, however, for those who are not fully web-broken it will be of great service.
Text searches
Sinbad is a front end to many search engines, and as such there is an extra step to performing any search, and that is selecting the 'module.' These modules are nothing more than little bits of help that tell the program how to interact with a search engine; however, the way they are conveniently listed and grouped under types makes it easier to find the right search engine to use.
The program itself when you first open it up tells you to click on the CDDB module, which is a good first example. Once you select the module you want, all you have to do is type in the text in the search bar at the top of the window. Because many search engines let you search in several areas, Sinbad lets you do this as well, although it is not as readily apparent.
You can refine the search by telling the program what information you have provided. To do this you click on the little magnifying glass in the text field and this will bring up a list of options. You can select any or all of these, and many modules have support for refining a search in this way.
Once you hit enter, the results will show below the search field. Sinbad always shows the first ten results, but you can get more by clicking on the more entry at the end of the list. Selecting any of the results will show the webpage in the area below the search results.
Category searches
There is a second way that Sinbad can show you information which is only available from certain modules, such as the Wiki and Amazon ones.
If you select the Amazon module, besides being presented with a text search field, you will also see a category view similar to how iTunes order tracks by Genre> Artist> Album. This is great because you can browse through it and refine your search as you go.
For example, choosing Games and then Mac games will show the first ten results for this category, but you can also type in the text field and for example search for Warcraft games, and the search will only take place in the currently selected category.
The Good
Excellent for those who are not yet at home on the Internet but still wish to use it as an information source. The ability to go to one place for any kind of search is invaluable.
The Bad
When using a category module, you cannot simply search for a text string on the entire site as it will only look in the currently selected category/subcategory.
The Truth
Internet search made simple, people who know what a Boolean search is should not bother, but anyone who is not yet trained should definitely give it a look.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
