Informant

Introduction

The Informant is a nifty service from Dartmouth University. It keeps you informed, via email, of new sites that particularly relate to your interests.

When you visit their site, you're asked to choose a user name and password. Once done with that, you're teleported to another form where you type in keywords and site addresses (URLs). The site administrators inform you that they will perform periodic searches through the search engine of your choice and email you when pages corresponding to those keywords or Urls have been updated or added.

A relatively remarkable idea.

Web sites come and go at a dizzying pace. We've found it virtually impossible to keep up with all the changes. Now, we're able to automate part of our search.

For instance, of course we're interested in employment and recruiting. So one set of our keywords included those terms. Of 4 search engines to choose from to do our dirty work, we chose Lycos, primarily because it seems to be more difficult to get a site added there than in any other of the options.

The day after we filled out and submitted the form, we received an email informing us that a search indeed had been conducted and we could now revisit the site, type in our user name and password, and learn of the results.

With gleeful abandon we went.

After logging in, we were faced with a table categorizing 25 pages in order of how closely they matched our keywords. Of the 25 URLs provided, one was repeated six times and another was repeated 3 times. This is not the fault of the Informant, though. It has a lot more to do with how web administrators give the same page several addresses in attempts to appear more frequently in the search engines.

Nonetheless, we went and visited the pages offered and did indeed find some new stuff.

The service is not perfect, of course. If pages are unreachable, and some are, the Informant still includes their URL. Then, too, if you do not visit the site to view the collected addresses, the Informant will continue to report same sites as new in subsequent email messages. And, our search can only be conducted via one search engine. We'd be happier if a meta-search engine could be used.

The Informant is, though, a time saving device. With the explosion of information on the Web, we'll take anything that saves us even a few minutes.