The Secret Agent Man

Using BullsEye

The BullsEye Manager, shown in Exhibit 1, is the central interface where you launch searches and manage all your Internet information. It consists of three major components, Agents, Resources, and Reports, all accessible from the tabs at the bottom of the window. The Agents tab displays information categories, or agents, for searching specific topics on the Internet. The Resources tab offers a variety of handy features to manage both Netscape Bookmarks and Microsoft Favorites (allowing you to easily copy and move from one format to the other) and shows the searches you want to run again. Finally, the Reports tab uses an Inbox to indicate the search reports awaiting you, plus an archive of previous search reports.

With the Agents tab selected, BullsEye Manager displays an extensive list of agents, or information categories, including Web Search, News Finder, People Talk, Book Finder, Software Finder, Business Finder, College Finder, FAQ Finder, and Health Answers. Each of these agents will also display subcategories in the upper-right pane of the BullsEye Manager window, along with a brief description of the agents in the lower-right pane.

For example, clicking the "News Finder" agent causes BullsEye to show many subcategories, such as General News, Business News, and Computing News, in the upper-right pane, as shown in Exhibit 2. You can select any of the options beneath the subcategories, such as "Searching Computing News," to open the Query dialog box, as pictured in Exhibit 3.

The Query dialog box lets you enter keywords to search for and provides a convenient Power query feature that makes use of Boolean operators (i.e., AND, OR, NOT), plus proximity operators (e.g., NEAR) to refine your search statement. The Filters button allows you to eliminate duplicate pages and exclude specific Web pages, sites, or even entire domains from your search. The Query dialog also includes options to improve your search results by eliminating bad (broken) links and retrieving the text from Web pages for analysis.

Enabling the analysis option causes BullsEye to download all the relevant documents from a search. Their contents are carefully and fully analyzed with the advanced features of the Verity search engine. This in depth analysis automatically scores the results based on their relevance to the keywords in your search statement and displays the results. For instance, switching on the options to improve results and using the Power query to assist in entering the search statement "ecommerce AND ‘transaction security’", produces the results pictured in Exhibit 4. These search "hits" shown in this Results window can be easily rearranged in ascending or descending order by clicking the Score, Title, URL, Search Engine, Rank, Date, and Size column headings.

The Stop, New, and Refine buttons in the toolbar across the top of the Results window make it simple to halt the search, begin a fresh search, or modify your current query and filters, respectively. The Status button displays all results, even those filtered out; Score arranges the analyzed hits based on their relevance to the query; Site organizes the results into a hierarchy of folders corresponding to the type of sites; and Concept arranges the hits into logical groups based on content similarity.

The Concept view can provide some very interesting alternate views of your search results. As Sundar puts it, "You can use the Concept view to automatically group information in separate folders with insightful names that represent the general content of the information in each folder. For example, if you searched for ‘cold fusion’ and displayed the results using the Concept view, the folder names would clearly reveal the documents that pertain to ‘cold fusion energy research’ and those that discuss the software product ‘Cold Fusion’ from Allaire Corp."

The last two buttons on the toolbar, Track and Tips, allow you to schedule automatic query updates (only BullsEye Pro) and receive advice on how you can make the most out of the information you have gathered. The Results window also contains a row of tabs across the bottom. The first tab, Highlights, displays the chief points of any Web page you select in the list of results. The Summary tab provides a brief digest of each Web document; Keywords lists the occurrences of the search terms you specified; and Notes enables you to add your own comments about a Web page.

To automatically open and load the associated Web page in your favorite Web browser for viewing, simply double-click it in the list of results. You can elect to view the page offline to reduce connection time.

BullsEye lets you save your query as report, like the one shown in Exhibit 5. Reports can be run as often as you like to obtain the latest information on a topic. With BullsEye Pro, you can use Tracker to automate this process by scheduling reports to be run on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis, as illustrated in Exhibit 6.

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