To Search the Web, These Programs Use More Engines Than the Indy 500

Finding your way around the Internet would be a major chore if it weren’t for the search engines. If you’re not familiar with the vast array of available search tools, visit https://www.larrysworld.com/searching.html for a primer and links to major search engines.

Offline searching tools can be even faster and more powerful than the ones you use online. Copernic 99 and WebFerret, for example, are programs you can download and run on your PC to search the Net using a variety of engines.

Copernic 99, from Copernic Technologies, might best be described as a search engine on steroids. When you enter the terms you’re searching for, it goes out to a variety of Internet search sites to find where those terms appear on the Web and in newsgroups.

The program is oriented by category. You can search the entire Web or you can select a topic area such as games, health, children, life, movies, music, sports, tech news and so on.

Copernic has several advantages over Web-based search engines. First, because it uses a variety of search engines, it will generally find more hits than any single engine.

Second, it organizes your results in a very easy-to-use format. Finally, it saves the results so you can get back to them at any time without having to repeat the search.

Copernic also can save your search results in Excel, Word or many other programs--a handy feature if you need to keep a record of Web sites on certain topics. Also, the program can determine that the sites it finds are still valid links, which saves you the frustration of clicking on links that don’t take you anywhere.

You can download the free version, Copernic 99, from https://www.copernic.com or, for $29.95, you can download and purchase Copernic 99 Plus, which includes 100 more search engines, more categories and, unlike Copernic 99, no advertising when you view your search results.

*

WebFerret from FerretSoft (https://www.ferretsoft.com) is a similar search program, but for the Web only. Like Copernic, you can get a free program or pay $26.95 for the Pro version, which lets you turn off advertising and provides extra features such as the ability to save results and perform more complex searches.

WebFerret is easier to use and has a simpler interface than Copernic. Copernic has more bells and whistles. I recommend that you download the free versions of Copernic and WebFerret and decide whether you think it’s worthwhile to pay for the pro version of the program you prefer.

Mac users who have operating system 8.5 or higher don’t have to download anything. The operating system comes with Sherlock, which, like these programs, can query multiple search engines and also lets you search for files on your hard drive and local area network.

Have you ever tried to print out a Web page? It’s easy from your browser’s print menu, but in addition to all the useful information on the page, you also print the graphics, including advertising. That can take extra time and use up a lot of paper and expensive ink. And sometimes what you really want to print is a collection of pages, or perhaps just part of a page. You can’t do that from your browser’s print menu.

Hewlett-Packard today is announcing HP Web PrintSmart Plus 2.0, a handy utility that fixes a number of Internet printing problems, giving you the ability to strip out graphics, reformat pages and print entire collections of pages. Say you’re doing research on what computer to buy. You visit Web pages from various vendors and publications and, each time you find a page that interests you, you click “add to collection.” When you’re done, you can print out the entire collection as a single document. But before you print, you have the option of formatting the pages in whatever order you want and all in one font.

The program, which requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher, installs its own browser window to surf the Web. When you find a page you want to print, you drag it into a collection window. You can also highlight a paragraph or text from a page and drag only that into the window.

Once you have built a collection, you can easily rearrange the page order and change the format, including eliminating spacing between pages, before printing. You can also save your collection for later use. Personally, I prefer browsing in Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator to HP Web PrintSmart’s browsing window. Fortunately, you can run your browser and the HP program at the same time and quickly add pages from your browser to an HP Web PrintSmart collection.

*

There are other ways to save time and ink when you print Web pages or anything else. Select the Properties button in the print manager and set your printer to print in draft mode and in black only. Draft mode is much faster and uses less ink, and by using black only, you save a lot of time and color ink. Another trick is to copy the text of the Web page into the Windows or Mac clipboard, paste it into a word-processing program and print from there.

If you use Word, select the Paste Unformatted option from the edit menu to avoid pasting in graphics and formatted text.

*

Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”