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WebFerret

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Are you tired of searching for the same piece of informationfrom one search engine to another, browsing through tons of result pages whichoften display irrelevant results, and waiting for heavy pages to load on yourscreen, especially at a time when you’re facing a bandwidth crunch? There’sgood news for you. Many applications have recently been developed to providehassle-free searching. One of these is WebFerret.

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WebFerret puts the power and speed of several search enginesinto one package. It works by querying multiple search engines simultaneously,removing duplicate URLs, and filtering results. It, therefore, quickly returns anarrow set of desired results. WebFerret works just like a search engine andlinks all results to corresponding Web pages. It also lets you view results byname, address, or source.

Let’s see how we can search with this utility. WebFerretoffers four possibilities for searching by keywords–All Keywords, AnyKeywords, Exact Phrase or Boolean Expression. The last option needs someexplanation. It means you can specify a logical expression using"AND", "OR", "AND NOT". To use this option, youneed to set up all the search engines you want to search in. For this, chooseOptions from the View Menu, click on the "Search Engines" tab, selectthe checkbox next to each search engine which you want, and click on OK or Applyfor changes to take effect. If you want to select all search engines, just rightclick and select "Enable All" in the "Search Engines" tab.

WebFerret also lets you set the closeness of match for yoursearch. Click on Advance Tab and select one of the options from the dropdownlist, for example, "Search entire page", "Search pagetitle", etc. One of the options also lets you remove duplicate results fromyour search. If you want all results displayed, do not select any option.Removing duplicates from the list, however, slows down the entire search.

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Another feature of WebFerret is that it can limit the maximumnumber of overall results or the number of results per search engine. For this,select Options in the View menu, click on the Advanced tab and fill the maximumnumber of results you want. You can also add filters to your result set toremove results that contains words specified by you, say pornography or foullanguage. To add filters, select Options from the View Menu, click on Filtersand select the option.

Now that you are all set, click on Find Now and see allresults that match your keywords and the configuration you chose. Happysearching.

Yakesh Arora

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