Here is an excerpt of the conclusion of the review
article that is appearing in the April issue of The Information Advisor.
Overall Evaluation of BullsEye 2
We spent a fair amount of time with BullsEye 2, and our overall impression
is very positive.
Did it do its job? It certainly scours more of the Web than any search
engine and, because it includes so many search engines, covers more than
the standard metasearch engines. Fortunately, BullsEye 2 removes the vast
majority of duplicates, so you are not buried by multiple hits of the
same Web page.
We were extremely impressed with the amount of intelligence behind this
product. There's no question that it was built from the ground up by people
with a deep understanding of Web searching, search engines, and user search
behavior. In addition to its powerful search capabilities, we found BullsEye
2 very intuitive, easy to navigate, and graphically very pleasing. The
help screens are excellent and well thought out. The dedupe feature, while
not perfect, is still far superior to what is available on a standard
metasearch engine. And the various build-in preferences and controls provide
a great degree of control and customization to users.
We found that those pre-set categories are a superb feature. Although
we tested the Web search category, researchers may find the subcategories
even more useful, since it is difficult to construct pinpoint searches
in metasearch engines.
There are, though, some downsides to BullsEye 2. First, this free version
includes banner ads, so you need to put up with flashing advertisements
while you are searching, which can be a bit distracting (and some of these
ads could be considered to be in questionable taste for some users, as
a few contain marginally offensive words and images). Of course, this
problem can be solved by purchasing the $149 BullsEye 2 Pro version (see
below), which does not include banner ads.
Another annoyance is the limit of no more than three open searches at
any one time. This is not a limitation in the BullsEye 2 Pro version.
Perhaps the major drawback, though, is adjusting to the amount of time
it takes BullsEye 2 to conduct searches compared to running a search on
a single search engine. While it varies based on several factors, we typically
needed to wait about one to two minutes for a search to be completed.
In the age of instant response, this can seem like a long time indeed.
And if you run the "3 star analysis" search within a search,
you'll be waiting even longer.
There are some fixes to this "wait problem." First, BullsEye
2 returns its hits to you as it is still searching, so you can begin clicking
on the first Web page links even as BullsEye 2 is still retrieving the
rest of its results. (You can also, of course, open other applications
on your desktop if you wish and work on that while your results are coming
in. It might be nice for the product to sound a little bell when it has
completed its search for users who choose this option.) Also, BullsEye
2 allows users to set their own preferences for the maximum amount of
time to spend searching.
The other larger problem, mentioned earlier, is the difficulty in conducting
precise Boolean searches when using a metasearch engine. BullsEye 2, like
all other search engines, still has work to do here.
The only other, more minor, disadvantage is that, because BullsEye 2 offers
so much, it takes a bit of time to become familiar with using it and understand
all of its capabilities. Although we were able to start searching right
away, it took us a couple of hours before we felt comfortable finding
our way around BullsEye 2, and a second day of searching before we felt
that we really understood the system. But everything is very well designed,
with superb help screens, so this was time well spent.
Bottom line, then. Who should use BullsEye 2, and under what circumstances?
Like all metasearch engines, BullsEye 2 is at its best for searching on
obscure topics, or when you want to scour as much of the Web as possible.
It would be particularly appropriate for obscure single-word searches,
where there's no danger of confusing search engines with Boolean operators.
Here, BullsEye 2's methods of searching, organizing, deduping, and displaying
results are superior to any of the existing Web-based search engines,
and so we would recommend it whenever a metasearch engine is called for.
We'd also recommend it whenever you want to use the power of the Verity
search engine on full text Web pages-here, for example, you can use the
proximity operator feature (e.g., X w/3 words of Y etc.), which is not
an option on many of the major search engines.
Despite its power and elegant design, though, we don't think that BullsEye
2 is really an appropriate substitute for using a powerful search engine
such as Google or Northern Light. You just give up too much ease of use
and speed when you use BullsEye 2. As much as we liked the product, we're
still going to turn to a favorite search engine like Google to do most
searches. If IntelliSeek can figure out how to pack the same power into
its product and make it as simple and fast to use as these search engines,
then it could be the ultimate Internet search tool. As it stands now,
BullsEye 2 (or BullsEye 2 Pro, see below) is a very worthy complement
to the standard search engines, and should be a valued tool in any information
professional's bag of search tricks.
Because BullsEye 2 is free, this would be an appropriate product to roll
out to advanced end-user searchers in an organization. It would be best
to accompany such an introduction with a short training session-even as
little as one hour-to ensure that the users have an adequate understanding
of the product's functions and features. BullsEye 2 is not geared for
the novice searcher; it is marketed to what Kadayam calls the "savvy
searcher," someone who has been using the Internet for at least a
year and knows a few basics about using search engines.
