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It is hard to believe the success of search engines, considering how unhelpful some of them are. For example, if I search for a name like "Bill Gates," I get thousands of matches. Perhaps this is why many of the search engines are offering stock quotes, news, free e-mail and Web pages, Internet access, Visa cards....

But there is one company trying to improve Web searches. It's called Agents Technologies, based in Quebec (there is a French version of the site at http://www.copernic.com/). The company was launched in 1996, has 25 employees, 21 of whom are programmers, and it has been financed by the founders' friends and family.

Agents Technologies' first product was Copernic 1.0. The name comes from the great 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who first realized the earth is not the center of the universe. In quick fashion, Copernic 1.0 has garnered top product honors from several trade magazines, resulting in 22,000 downloads within nine days. Not bad for a first try.

The software, which is consistent with the new Windows 98 standard interface, simultaneously checks the top-10 search engines, such as AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Magellan, OpenText, WebCrawler, UseNet, and DejaNews. The French version can access nine francophone search engines.

Copernic is programmed to return 100 results for every query and no more than 10 queries per search engine, although you can change these limits to specify a maximum of 500 results and no more than 150 queries per search engine. You can also elect to search only certain search engines.

What is cool is Copernic then weeds out duplicate and dead pages. It allows you to save the results on your hard drive so you can browse the results off-line. There is also a search log, which allows you to edit, sort, and review your search results, which are viewable in HTML reports.

Like any good high-tech company, Agents Technologies works in Internet time. Two months after releasing its first product, version 1.1 was born. The upgrade makes use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 and ActiveX technology. For example, Copernic has an integrated browser window, making it easy to filter, sort, and search results.

And just recently, Agents Technologies released the next major version of its software: Copernic 98 Plus. Unlike Win 98, this software really works.

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