Orbiscope Meta Search for Windows

This utility searches the Internet for terms in various content categories, such as Web, FTP, News, Weblogs, Theses, and Science. You select a category, type a search term into the query box, and hit the Enter key. Results appear in Orbiscope Meta Search's main window, broken into Search Engine, Agent's Suggestions, Sub-categories, and Ignored Results tabs. You can search within found pages, remove dead links, and skip personal pages. The Analysis tool ranks pages by content. The program supports most popular Web engines and lets you add new ones.

However, the interface is confusing, cluttered with panels, and difficult to customize. In our testing, nothing ever appeared in Agent's Suggestions, and the help file contained no information about agents. You can't view found pages within the program. It takes too much fuss to monitor Web pages for changes, and the program can't watch pages for updates more frequently than once an hour. It takes forever to download the ZIP file, installing and opening the program takes too long, and the program eats up 38MB of memory. Most users would be better off with Google or Yahoo, but researchers may want to give Orbiscope Meta Search a whirl.