InformationWeek

As with many knowledge-management consoles, Copernic 99 Plus allows searching for only one category at a time. This is fine for consumer applications, but doesn't save time when your search topic transcends one category. For the scenario, I needed to find all the information about a new software release, so I want to peruse the news, tech news, tech reviews, and business and finance categories. And as I get more intelligent about which specific search engines deliver which results, I want the ability to customize and refine my categories and sources, just as I would refine my search terms, to yield the best results. Copernic allowed me to do this; the results of a refined search were marginally better than the first pass.

In my searches for products, people, and processes, the searches for competitive information about key staff yielded some good results. I could get those same results searching specific databases myself, but Copernic aggregates them so I didn't have to. Searches of product and market-intelligence issues (such as knowledge-management market size) in the business and finance and the Web categories yielded minimal hits that were of no use, while knowledge-management software yielded too many unrelated hits.

The clean interface of Copernic 99 Plus speeds learning and lowers support costs. But for the business professional, it may not yield the results and level of search customization required. At about $30, it's a useful addition to searching across multiple search engines, and it could be quite useful to professionals, such as salespeople, who perform periodic searches.

Beeline
I liked this program right off the bat for its amusing and informative animated tutorial. The tutorial did not really cover much, but it didn't have to; Beeline is simple to use. One executes searches using plain English-there's no need for users to know how to use Boolean operators. This opens up use to a wider, less computer-sophisticated set of professionals.

This simplicity, however, comes at a price. Refinement of searches using additional terms cannot be done on the fly; you need to remember the original terms, add new ones, and search again. Beeline accesses about 40 search engines and newsgroups. You can download a 30-day version for free from Beeline's Web site.

The program has a number of simple features that make it easy to use. One is the addition of a plug-in from Alexa Software that recommends other sites visited by users who have visited a site that comes up on your search. This provides another set of directions for the user to pursue information, this time leveraging the experiences of others. If you could use this feature to identify similar sites visited by predetermined users (such as all of your senior managers or all of the knowledge workers in a given division), you could really take advantage of the corporate experience. Alexa, unfortunately, doesn't have a business version of its product.

You can also run the cursor over Web-site titles and get a quick description of the results; I found this a quick way to view results of a search and pick out the best ones.

Searches for our key emerging issues yielded a hodge-podge of results. Looking for knowledge- management software market size yielded some hits, though I had no idea why they were retrieved with the search terms provided. But there were a couple of gems, and I found them quickly.

Beeline limits your ability to customize and refine search terms and information sources in real time. Both Beeline and Copernic 99 Plus can save and send favorite searches; you could create a library of favorite searches and distribute to the sales and marketing staff, and let them customize, share, and collaborate on them. Beeline's best application with business professionals is limited to staff-level employees with little or no search experience.