DEVONagent 2.1– See digests of your search quick and accurate results
Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad - © 2007
DEVON Technologies, LLC 401 Front Avenue - Suite 204 Coeur d'Alene, ID, 83814 +1-208-286-1704 Fax (U.S.) +1-866-605-1337 Grossingersheimer Strasse 21 74321 Bietigheim-Bissingen Germany, European Union Phone (E.U.): +49-7142-988086 |
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$50 USD, Upgrade from v.1 $20 USD, 25% Educational discount available. Requirements: Mac OS X 3.9 or later; Universal binary; ca. 20 MB Hard Drive Space; 512 MM or more RAM, 256 KB or faster Internet connection. Localized in English, German, French and Japanese. Version Posted: 08 Mar 2007 Audience: All users who need a powerful research-focused easy to use internet search tool. Strengths: Generates a quick, useful, effective, easy to understand digest of the search results. The search engine optimizes your search efforts toss the unneeded chaff. The software’s interface is both intuitive and easy to use and in case you’re not feeling intuitive, there’s a ca. 270 page user’s manual that at times helps. Its tutorial section is excellent. Weaknesses: The new software features, despite being powerful, are so poorly explained that they are difficult to utilize. Were the manual, where it focuses on it more powerful advanced search features more clearly written, this product would have been rated more highly. Previous Reviews: http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/august2005/Software/DevonAgent.htm For a 60 hour demo of this product: http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html Copyright Notice: Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.9, connected to a cable modem. |
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Publisher Description
“DEVONagent is the solution for you if you are tired of clicking hundreds of links delivered by Google & Co. just to find out that most of the links are either outdated, broken or lead to junk pages. It communicates with search engines, digs for you through all the results and gives you only those documents that are really worth reading. Even better, it summarizes the accumulated knowledge and presents you with a list of the most important topics and an interactive mind map. Finding information on the Web has never been easier.”
Introduction
Having access to Google and a host of other search sites, all at no cost, why should someone spend $50 USD for another browser? Indeed there were not only free or shareware general-purpose browsers, but also browsers capable of doing simultaneous multi-site searches. All you need to do is browse at the PureMac site http://www.pure-mac.com/.
I’d originally asked myself that question in my August of 2005 macC review of Version 1.7 and working with version 2.1 just reinforces my belief of the software’s value. Despite the fact that the software is aimed a heavy information search users such as Journalists, Information analysts, scientists and lawyers, it is an outstanding tool for doing genealogical research or searching for obscure recipes or all about that great Celtic band, The Chieftains. I have also used the software as a high-end interface to Google and MSN Search.
Working With the Product (In part paraphrased from the users manual)
Okay, after I dragged the application to my application folder I was ready to start using it. No, I didn’t initially read the manual, having continued to use Version 1.7 since I reviewed it. I had enough confidence that I understood how the software functioned from past experience. Some of my search experiences are reported later in this review.
FIRST PRINCIPLE OF A SUCCESSFUL QUERY Make the query precise and unambiguous. DEVONagent's tools for clarifying your query are really quite simple and can help you obtain a high percentage of useful results rather than a confusing "mess" of irrelevant results. |
To initiate a search with DEVONagent, simply open the application and choose "File > New Search..." if necessary, and select a search set from the search field pop-up menu (the little triangle in the search query field). Then enter the search term(s) you want DEVONagent to look for into the search field and click Start.
DEVONagent sends your query to one or more search engines, depending on the search settings (see the manual’s chapters "Settings" and "Plug-ins"). It then collects the results and displays them on the "Pages" tab. Then select any of the found pages to display its relevant information as plain text in the lower frame. Use the Sort menu to sort the results on any way you need.
From all collected results, DEVONagent calculates a dynamically updated digest, which can be found on the "Digest" tab. These, so called relevance charts sometimes make sense to the user, but for the most part I ignore them. More importantly are the search finding digests. The digest is a plain text summary of all information in the result pool DEVONagent thinks to be relevant to selected topics. It is very useful when deciding which of the found links you might want to pursue.
Using the Software
To keep things simple, I, for the most part, used the product’s default Fast Scan mode, which limited my results to a maximum of a 100 hits. In once case I used the more extensive web search abilities of deep scan mode which can both search deeper using metacrawlers and other beasties to search deeper (and slower.) None of my search results in this mode approached that limit. The search results were returned so rapidly that I did not have time to take another sip of coffee after clicking Start. Although the percentage of items I could use was often only 5-10% of what was found, the DEVONagent software allowed me to check (digest mode) an abstract of the website for relevance.
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DEVONagent Search Page |
My searches made some, but not extensive, use of Boolean operators (e.g.,
AND/OR/NOT/NEAR, or grouping search terms with quotation marks.) For the purposes of this review would have been needlessly time consuming. If I need Boolean operators, I know I can use these combinations plus other logic operators described in the user manual). The software is able to work with more complex search criteria than Google or other search engines I’ve used. For those who needed addition help using the programs advanced search (my term) features, tutorials on the DEVONacademy > Tutorials pages are both easy to understand and helpful.
In addition, during my last review of this product, I had not taken the time to rephrase the questions (vary the search terms for the information sought). This time around, I did that with better, but not totally satisfactory results. As always, my focus when searching for technical information, is gaining information at the level that a good reference librarian would provide. I know this is unfair because librarians have access to private databases as well as more comprehensive search defining tools, but I keep trying.
Making In Depth Use of
Boolean Searches — From my reading it
would appear that DEVONagent’s Boolean logic feature helps further focus a
search, beyond what I was able to do. [A Primer on using Boolean search
delimiters would be welcome; perhaps I’ll search for one.] Focusing search
results is especially useful when you are doing deep scan searches that can yield up to 500 results. [I’ve so
far avoided this search mode.]
Prior to checking the new manual, I used DEVONagent to gain information on topics such as those listed below. When comparing results from Google with DEVONagent, I searched the first seven to nine pages (10 items per page) for relevance. This is the number of hits equivalent to the number of found items in DEVONagent. My search focus and actual experience in finding the sought for information, is described below.
Search Experience
Radiation Medicine (Other Terms Searched: Radiation in Medicine, Radio Medicine, Radionuclides in Medicine) — DEVONagent returned sets of overlapping hits 66-75 in number) most of which were useful. [A partial Pages View is illustrated) Google overwhelmed me with hits (704,000 to 29,000,000) some of which were useful.
Popiah Buffet Recipes (Other Terms Searched: Popiah Party, Popiah Buffet) — Most of the hits from DEVON were to blogs that did not contain detailed recipes; but there were a few good hits. These Chinese crepes are wonderful, and the 30-45 minutes and follow-up, gave me some fine cooking ideas. I did not choose to search Chinese Crepe Recipes, but would have if I’d come up dry with the other terms. I also got 11,200 hits in Google, something I did not follow-up on.
Nuclear Energy and Global Warming — The search term gave me 75 documents in DEVON AGENT, which I did NOT need to narrow down based on reading the digests. When searched in Google, I got 2,130,000 hits, many of which in the first ten pages of the Google search results were commentary on commentaries. Both searches were fast but having digests available made it easier to check and chose the DEVONagent hits. I was planning on doing some Boolean Searches on this topic, but could figure out how to better focus the query.
Cyber and Security Locks— I am planning a macC article on this topic and decided to use the opportunity to get better familiar with the topic. My initial search with DEVONagent primarily resulted in computer protection related items, rather then the physical locks and keys protection for which I searched.
Changing the search criteria to CyberLock and CyberKey gave me dozens of hits that focused around description like: “access control without wiring or power, in padlocks, switches and doors. CyberKey and CyberLock provide wireless access control in doors, cabinets, padlocks, enclosures, safes and switches.” I archived these for future use.
Of the 1,140,000 hits I got with Google, the first 10 pages contained little information related to my search needs. Lot of interesting and to me enticingly distracting material, but I know I must stay focused. A more focused Google search reduced the number of hits to 563, many of which were relevant. Although both sets of hits contained commercial information, the individual sites I spot-checked had enough details on the general attributes of these protective tools to serve as a basis for an article.
One hint: use the words in probable hit to refine your search – Better results might have been obtained from the phrase CyberLock or CyberKey. For some reason, in DEVONagent, the results of using the “or” were not better. For some reason the items on the first 12 pages of Google’s 23,100 hits seemed more relevant.
Software Reviews DEVONagent (Compared to Google Results) — Although I got more hits in Google, both searches gave me comparable returns. Being able to use the digests in DEVONagent, substantially speeded up the search process.
A Recipe for Thai
5-Spice Pork, Duck or Chicken— My
initial search for the items themselves, and the combined names of the dishes
was disappointing. What turned up were restaurant menus, around the world, many
of which looked wonderful. Adding the term recipe, the name of the dish
made all the difference. But even that added focus resulted in hits to many
recipes that had noting to do with the Thai dishes I sought to cook. I did well
searching for Thai 5-Spice Chicken
Recipe, getting a better-focused set
of hits both in DEVONagent and Google. Much to my surprise, I also searched DEVONagent with the
parenthetic additional phase (NOT restaurant) and but it did not help focus the
search. I wonder what I did wrong in my Boolean phasing?
Even more surprisingly, a the narrowed searches for the name of the dish Thai 5-Spice Duck or Thai 5-Spice Pork, or these items individually gave no hits in either Google or DEVONagent. Putting quotation marks around parts of these phases did not help. In all cases, the word recipe gave the search a magic touchstone. Strange!
Glossary of Chinese Cooking Terms (DEVONagent only) — I tried a number of variations on the theme including: Chinese Cooking Terms (75 hits), Chinese Cooking Terms Glossary (63 hits) and Glossary of Chinese Cooking Terms (54 hits). But in all of these I could have saved myself the duplicate searches. Click, click and I got two great hits in DEVONagent, so I did not try doing then Google search.
A Summary of DEVONagent’s Key Features
Strong Booleans Search Features — Besides the typical Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT, DEVONagent provides you with the much more powerful NEAR, BEFORE and AFTER operators. Typically, only scientific high-end databases feature them, but DEVONagent makes them available for routine Web researches. For example, paraphrased from the manual: Suppose you want to search for information about the mercury contamination of fish and to focus on information released by or referring to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The first challenge to formulating the search is recognizing that the agency can be referred to as the “Environmental Protection Agency", "EPA" and E.P.A." No, you don’t want to do an AND search on these alternatives. Using: ("Environmental Protection Agency" OR EPA OR "E.P.A.") is better.
There's another potential ambiguity, because it's possible that a large reference source might contain the word "fish" in one section dealing with fishery resources, and contain the word "mercury" in another section dealing with the history of barometers. Tying in the need for information about mercury effective search criteria becomes ("Environmental Protection Agency" OR EPA OR "E.P.A.") AND (fish NEAR mercury)
General Result Archive Capability — DEVONagent finds, collects, and organizes information with powerful search architecture, and a simple to use built-in archive. It was easy to add search result pages to it with just one click. That allowed me to organize my research results into folders and sub-folders. I could later search the archives for what I needed, using a Finder-like toolbar search field.
Search Sets to Help Optimize
Searches — The new version uses a Search
Set metaphor in which selected plugin act a search delimiters. As TidBITS Matt Neuburg noted, “At the heart of
DEVONagent's functionality are its Search Sets, which despite the name are not
"sets" of anything; they are the instructions for performing a
search. So a DEVONagent user's most basic needs are to understand what I can
better do with a Search Set will do.”
Alas, using search sets was something I could not master in the two weeks I worked with the software. On the positive side, there are more than 130 plugins for popular search engines, databases, and search tools, to assist in creating predefined search sets. Unfortunately optimizing my use of them will need to wait until I better understand Search Set (better termed criteria or focus.)
Scanners by any other name — Search Content Scanners, a special type of plug-in (filter), post-process and filters the results using additional criteria about the resulting found items contents. This way you can find only pages containing links to software archives, webcams or picture galleries or even exclude them. Also, you can use scanners to display all images, links, email addresses or liked documents contained in a web page in a convenient drawer. [Once again, due to my lack of understanding on how best to use these tools, I ignored them.]
Visualizing Search Results — A graphical topics map, now available in version 2.1, displays colored bubbles for topics, with lines linking related topics. Red, yellow and black bubbles correspond to terms in the topics list. Blue bubbles are additional topic terms that are not in the topics list. Lines between the bubbles indicate surmised connections between topics.
For additional features, new and old, check the publisher’s web page and the software manual.
Software Limitations
Finding The Manual — Unlike many products, the manual was not a part of the download package. I did find it on the developers web site Support > DEVONacademy > DEVONagent Manual. This was a bit more effort than most users will make.
Manual Shortfalls — In addition although the introductorily materials and tutorials (getting started) were excellent and the detailed uses of the various pull down menu items clear, other parts of the manual were difficult to understand and use. I would welcome a significant expansion of, with examples, of the material that focuses on plugins, scanners and the other technical tools that enhance the ability to do an in depth search. With out such detail, would be power-search users - like me - who need enhanced search capability will, remain frustrated by their inability to use the tools provided by the developer.
With feedback from Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann, Devon’s
President, I was pointed to the tutorials, which solved many of my problems to
better use Boolean search terms. They also provided help for my taking
advantage of the plug-ins and post processing scanners. However, I still have
along way to go before I master the later and therefore feel comfortable doing
more complex focused searches. Using secondary queries to narrow down search
results is another area that I need to learn.
Side-by-side comparison views still needed — When searching variations on a theme, as I did for a year ago for search engines, I would like to have the ability to display several search results side-by-side to more easily look for newly found items. I would welcome a “docucomp” feature. Feedback from the developer provided me with a possible solution. “You could of course open multiple search windows, run different scans and compare the results.” That worked, but a docucomp feature were make side-by-side comparisons easier to browse. Note, I’d asked for this feature in my version 1.7 review.
A Glossary of Terms — The developers use words like plugins and scanners in non-traditional ways. A glossary would be helpful
Conclusion
DEVONagent 2.1 remains a great search tool. I ended up finding almost all of what I needed to know, rapidly, and with fewer irrelevant hits than by doing advanced Boolean query-supported searches in Google. I do at least 3-5 searches, some simple and others complex, every day. I remained disappointed when searching for more esoteric technical information, the kind provided by a reference librarian, when I can afford one. But that is a learning curve issue, not the fault of the software. Nevertheless, after only a few searches, I knew that this updated program remained a keeper.
The ability of the program to query multiple search engines simultaneously, and to visit each link for you to filter and summarizes the results is an invaluable time saver. As a result DEVONagent steers you much closer to the content you want, without a lot of googling around dead or outdated sites.
I, as likely you do, get tired of clicking through the hundreds of links delivered by Google (or Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.) Indeed I routinely seldom check past the first 5-10 pages of Google search results likely missing a gem or two. Actually I search for two pages past the last relevant hit I find in a Google search.
It also bugs me to find many of the links are outdated, broken, or lead to junk pages. Google has no way to sort hits by date, a feature that would be helpful. Therefore, I often use DEVONagent to either do an initial search, or more routinely, to redo one that came up dry when done in Google. It has been a part of my dock since version 1.7 and sits next to the icon for FireFox.
The product does an excellent job of communicating with search engines, digging through all the found results for you. As my tests with both this and version 1.7 demonstrate, there’s a lot to gain by using DEVONagent for search for information on the Internet.
Not tool is perfect, but it more
often then not, this software gives me only those documents that are worth
reading. Even more impressively, it summarizes the collected information and
presents me with a list of the most important topics, which I can check out.
Finding the information I need on the web has gotten significantly easier with
DEVONagent 2.1. Although I’m still not able to make use of it’s more
sophisticated features, all of my results out-googled-Google.
New to this version is an interactive mind map to help make sense of the findings, but since I’m “graphically impaired” it did nothing for me.
Recommendation
I asked myself whom this powerful search tool would best serve? That turned out to be an easy question — anyone who:
- Does at least 2-3 searches a computer working day to support their business or hobby projects.
- Is tired of thousands of false hits in Google or Ask.com.
- Wants to focus their search results closer to what is being sought.
- Finds that reading a digest of a search item more useful than double clicking a on a found page and figuring out whether the contents are relevant.
Perhaps more to the point is whether the new $50 USD price or $20 USD update is worth your money?
One reason for buying the product or updating the earlier version is to make use of the new more powerful plugin and scanner features to focus your searches. As noted earlier, the product is aimed both at casual but repeat Web surfers and serious researchers. What it does, it does well, but you must help it to wok effectively when formulating search criteria.
Alas, the advanced search criteria (features) are imperfectly explained in the help notes/Manual. Indeed, I almost agree with Matt Neuburg’s conclusion. But indeed information to support a more effective use of the product for advances searching, is available on the website, the tutorials were just a bit hidden from where I’d normally search.
Do follow Matt’s advice but remember there are helpful tutorials on the site to smooth you r becoming a master of DEVONagent. Matt notes: “In my view, the increased price, … and unhelpful manual are potentially serious obstacles. The best thing, however, is to download the demo (a 5.7 MB download) and decide for yourself.”
Doc sez: Given all of that, I would buy the software and hope for a better and clearer future manual. A manual, which better explains the more advanced search customizing features and provides practice examples rather than my having to rely on tutorials would be of great service to users needing in-depth search tools.
PS:
Why I’m Not Using DEVONagent as my Default Web Browser
Overall, I found that DEVONagent, based on the Safari engine, could serve well as an integrated web browser. However, I still choose not to make it my default browser even though I know it is especially tailored to the needs of web researchers, among which I number. I’ve updated and patched Safari with other shareware tools such as PithHelmet and I’d rather not give up Apple's product. Indeed, although I use FireFox extensively, it to takes second place to Safari. But the decision I’ve made about choosing a default browser is a personal one having nothing to do with the merits of DEVONagent 2.1. Your decision will likely be different from mine.
