14 DAY TRIAL // Searching is an action that you have to perform daily, and it's everywhere around you. No matter if it's on love, war, writing or something else...everybody searches for something, like the perfect match, the victory, or the right words, and the Internet couldn't miss this opportunity.
Each search engine usually searches a percent of the available pages from the World Wide Web, but never all of them, at least not yet. In this case, asking for better results is a common thing, but in order to get everything there can be found from the available search engines, you have to go a step further and use a meta-search engine. But what is this?
A meta-search engine is another kind of search engine, one which sends your requests to several individual search engines like Google, or to databases and returns the results from each one. This is a great time-saver for the end user, allowing you to enter the search terms only once and access several search engines simultaneously, increasing at the same time your chances to find what you're looking for.
I hope you got the idea so far; and if you didn't, don't worry, since today's meta-search software should make things clear. Yes, this time it's a program, not a Web site, and its name is Telescope Search.
Telescope Search reached version 7.6.2 last month and it?s free to use for personal and commercial purposes. Downloading and installing it is a child's play, the setup package being a bit smaller than 200KB. Let's get down to business now!
Telescope Search's interface is simple and extremely easy to use: it has a menu bar, a toolbar and a work area that handles results display. What I like about the interface is that the toolbar icons are well done, although the meaning behind a few of them stays hidden until you place your mouse cursor above and see the tooltip.
Using the program should be as easy as installing it, and there isn't much to say about this, but I'll try to do my best.
The first thing you should do is to enter a term to search into the Query text field - located into the toolbar - and the number of pages that you want each individual search engine used to return. If you want to speed up your search, this value should be lowered to 1 or 2, otherwise, to get more result, you may increase it as much as you like.
Once you hit the Enter key and the search finishes, you can visit any of the links displayed or copy and paste them into a browser. Apart from this, you can also get the summary for each of your results, as there are HTML pages that can be opened only if you use an external browser.
By default, the results are sorted by their search engine ranking, descendingly. If you want to change that, all you have to do is click the Title, URL or Summary bars to sort results based on those items.
If you think the default display mode is not for you, go to the View menu and choose the Large Icons View or change the way result columns fit into the program's window.
The current results can be saved for further use, but there's something even more useful than just saving your results. What about searching and displaying images, news headlines and more, even custom categories that you can set up? Sounds good to me...and all you have to do is use the Search menu, the toolbar buttons or the keyboard shortcuts available for the six base categories.
Most of the times, when you search for something on the Internet, some of the results may be dead links, and Telescope Search can't avoid getting them; instead, it offers you a tool to check this before trying to visit broken sites. Once your search operation is complete, you have to verify the results, using the Ctrl+A shortcut, the command from the Tools menu or the toolbar button.
If you want to change the search settings, first of all you have to check the Help file to understand the syntax of the initialization file that you have to edit manually, and then perform the changes. My advice is to keep a backup copy of the Search.ini file, just in case...
Telescope Search is a freeware tool that you must get your hand on, or at least try it. Although not perfect yet, it won't disappoint you!
The Good
This program is extremely useful, easy to use and, above everything else, completely free. Its features make it the perfect tool for people performing online research and also for the rest of us, since I am sure that 99.9% of the Internet users use a search engine at least once every day.
The Bad
An internal browser would be a great addition to this program, and I missed that a lot. An assisted mode of adding new search engines would also come handy, instead of the manual editing of the Search.ini file that must be done now to accomplish this task.
The Truth
The truth lies everywhere, but finding it is a bit harder. My final advice is to get Telescope Search and start seeking, there's no reason for you not to do it, no matter if you're a beginner or an expert.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
