Software Reviews

Reviews

Product: Copernic Agent Professional

Cost: $79.95 US/Euro

Website: http://www.copernic.com/

Review: The installation process was simple enough. You can choose which search categories you want and where you want their menu bars installed (the categories included IE, MS Office and so on - I selected all of them). It is possible to change them at a later date. I did a quick search with the new program and was pleased to see how fast it works. Once you have done a fast search you can analyse the findings to narrow down the results. It had another great time saver feature--if you are in a rush and do not want to spend hours wading through hundreds of search results, the Copernic Agent Professional (CAP) deleted similar entries in different search engines automatically.

A function which I really love is called Tracking Manager'. I used to have a program which just watched web pages for me, but I uninstalled it as Tracking manager works very well (It can even alert you by email if a page changed). The search manager can also track search results, i.e. the program informs you when new search entries appear on the Internet which is great function to find useful material..

So I tried to go all out and I told CAP to look for the term 'information operations' in all 8 search engines and analysed the results (with following options: saving pages and images, validating links, detecting languages, comparing pages, refining results, extracting concepts, etc.) First it found 2777 results and then it started an analysis which took a bit longer than an hour. Afterwards I was able to browse through all the results and I had all the pages stored locally. Next thing I set ticked the Track search function, so that CAP repeats the search according to the frequency I define and then emails all the results.

Bottom line: I will still be using Google, but I could not live without Copernic Agent Professional anymore as it is just such a great automated tool which saves me hours of work.

The only thing I would like to see is when CAP is doing the automated task (such as checking pages for changes) you cannot use it and you have to wait till it is done. In the word of multitasking it should possible to do the checking in the background whilst still be able to use the program to do searches. There is also a free version of the product available with less functionality.

Rating 9 out of 10