Sgt. Zondi is a personal web search spider. It is a program that will conduct a web search via your own computer by following web links so as to seek out current web sites that match your search criteria. It is shareware ( US$50 ).
There are a number of factors that justify the creation of Sgt. Zondi.
1. The never-ending expansion of the web means that even the best search engines are no longer able to keep up. Figures quoted by Search Engine Watch in November 1999 show a current estimate of 800 million web pages in existence, of which ONLY 25% are catalogued by the best search engines. Your favourite search engine is at best only showing you A QUARTER of what is out there!
2. In spite of claims by search engines that they update frequently, this is often not the case. In a report by Search Engine Watch one of the major search engines added only 208 new pages containing the word "the" in October 1999. This is why search engines so frequently return you dead links.
3. Search engines often try to be too clever. You want "marvellous spam" and you get "marmalade and jam" too.
4. Most of the time, in a given web subject area, there are 5-10 "main" sites that dominate, and become a daily destination for those interested in the subject. These sites carry focused commentary and news, and announce links to any relevant new sites that are created. It can take months for these new sites to be catalogued by the search engines.
What Sgt. Zondi does is allow you to set up queries that seed your search with the dominant web sites, and then to examine these sites and their links, generating further sites to search for your search criteria. ( If you don't know where to start, Sgt. Zondi can utilise the search engines to provide the seed sites ).
This enables Sgt. Zondi to:
- Return to you all the latest links.
- Return to you sites that exist and are loadable NOW.
- Return to you sites that actually do match your search criteria.
Sgt. Zondi gives you:
Tested Links!
Current Links!
Spot-On URLs!
Sgt. Zondi is not another go-to-the-searchengines-and-present-the-results tool. Its a spider, a crawler, a robot.
Sgt. Zondi, because it is a personal tool, follows all the links and does NOT stop where normal robots fear to tread.
Last updated on 12-03-2000