Roverbot

Danger, Will Robinson

Using Newbot to Track Layoffs, Competitors, and Industry Specific News

NewBot saves your energy. A roaming newshound, NewBot crawls the Web continuously in search of items of interest to you. Then, it filters the items and delivers updates right to your desktop. What a terrific invention.

There are now two versions of the program available. A web-based version allows you to do your search through Wired's web site. The Personal Agent, available only for Windows 95 or Windows NT, makes deliveries right to your desktop.

How to Use It

• Choose where to search from the first drop-down menu. You can do either news sites, the Web, or Usenet groups.
• Then, from the next menu, highlight how old you want the results to be. You can choose from between 6 hours to whenever.
• In the third box, type your search terms. Let's say you want an update on who's downsizing. Enter downsizing or layoffs and see what happens. If you enter more than one word, you'll get back documents containing all the words you've entered unless you the operators AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and quotation marks.
• Start the search.

Results

Within a short time, the NewBot screen expands and gives you what it's found.

You'll see the date and time of the posting or update, how NewBot has ranked it, the name of the site it was found on, the title and summary of the document, and the URL.