A SPEEDY METASEARCH ENGINE THAT MAKES IT EASY TO FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
If you've been accessing the web since the mid-90's, you've heard of Open Text. It was one of the first major search engines on the Internet, developed by a company of the same name. Eventually, the Open Text Company decided to change its focus and concentrate on selling their search systems to businesses, and the Open Text search engine disappeared.
Query Server is one of the products Open Text is selling, but it's also a nifty metasearch engine, available to anyone who searches the web. In addition to providing general web metasearches, it offers specialized metasearches of four subject areas - health, news, government and money. Everything about Query Server is, clear, compact, efficient and fast. When you use it, you know you're in the hands of a professional.
Web Search: (To get to the search page, click on Web under Search Pages on the upper left side of the page.) Query Server accesses 10 major search engines - AltaVista, AOL, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST, HotBot, MSN, Northern Light, Sprinks, and Yahoo! (Notably missing is Google.) You can choose to search any number of these engines.
Search Tips
There's a drop-down menu under the search box with the choices All of the above terms - to require that all the words you enter appear in each result and Any of the above terms - to return results with all or any number of the search words.
Query Server supports quotation marks to enclose phrases, the Boolean operators AND, OR , NOT and NEAR and the asterisk to search for web pages that contain your search word followed by any ending (e.g., invest* will retrieve items containing investor, investing, investment, etc.)
There is also a menu for choosing the maximum number of results you want to retrieve, another which which lets you choose how long the search should last, and a third menu that gives you three options for organizing the result clusters (groups of results) that Query Server returns to you - by content (subject), by site and content, and by site.
Results with Added Value
The organization, clarity and informativeness of Query Servers's results add greatly to their usefulness, and reduce the time it takes to find the most relevant results for your purposes. Items retrieved from a search all appear on the same page, and are arranged in groups called result clusters.
After your search, you're shown exactly how many results were found and from which search engines. Then you're given a list of clusters of results with the amount of items in each cluster.
For example, when I searched using the phrase "corporate bond funds", I retrieved 149 results in 14 clusters. Since I had chosen the result clusters to be organized by content, some of the groups listed were bonds funds, mutual funds, bonds performance, fixed income, etc. The same search organized by site resulted in clusters for the Vanguard site, CNN site, Sun Trust site, etc. You can select any cluster and be brought to the particular search results of that group.
Each result includes, title, description, relevance rating, size, date, search engine it was retrieved from, and url.
Specialized Searches That are Fast and Wide-Ranging.
Query Server offers specialized searches about four subjects - News, Health, Money and Government, and the search engine selections in all categories are excellent. You can use the same search operators as you did in the web search, and the retrieved items are returned in the same form as web search results. (To get to the specialized search pages, click on the subject you need under Search Pages on the upper left side of the page.)
Health Search is especially notable as it includes a majority of medical search engines appropriate for research instead of the chiefly consumer health engines that most specialized health searches offer. Search engines accessed include Medline, Medscape Clinical Content, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins Infectious Diseases, Medscape News, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, and others.
Health Search can be particularly helpful when you're looking for reputable research studies on a topic that relates to health. For example, to try to find research on one of the herbal remedies that is popular now, I entered:
garlic AND effects
I retrieved 124 results, many of which were directly relevant to my topic.
Money Search, in contrast, is basically geared to consumers, searching such engines as CNNfn, Investor Guide, Money Magazine, Smart Money, and others. News Search accesses 11 newspapers and news services, while Government Search accesses 13 US government agencies and databases.
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