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What is the difference between v3 and v4 of iMetaSearch? |
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Version 4 of iMetaSearch comes in two flavors. The Pro and Free flavors are identical except that the Free flavor can only use the Google engine and is limited to 100 search results. The Pro flavor has 12 engines including Google and has no limit on the number of search results.
Version 4 of iMetaSearch has the following new features that have been added since version 3.
1) Engine categories have been added to help organize engines. 2) Groups (called topics in version 3) have colors, not just numbers, which makes it easier to spot patterns. 3) Result summaries can have images, in version 3 they would just show a placeholder image. 4) Updated all sections of the manual. 5) Better Vista compatibility. 6) Bug fixes.
Everything that is in version 3.04 of iMetaSearch is also in version 4 of iMetaSearch Pro except that the Build Engine command has been removed because no one was using it.
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How is this search program different from Google? |
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Google does an excellent job of returning a list of web pages that match the words or phrases typed in by a user. Usually a relevant web page is in the first page of results.
iMetaSearch differs by
- gathering results from many engines, and this includes not only search engines, but also searches on blogs, groups, books, papers, and more.
- analyzing results to make it easier to find relevant ones through indexing, grouping, and updating the relevance of each index word or result whenever you mark an interesting result or word. This dynamic re-ordering of results and index words based on what interests you is one of the most important features.
- exporting index words and results to CSV files (for Microsoft Excel) and results to HTML files so you can use other programs to further process results for marketing, research, or other purposes.
- choosing, fixing, and importing engines within iMetaSearch, allowing you to add web sources on the fly, which can also be shared with other iMetaSearch users.
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A group is a collection of similar results. During analysis, iMetaSearch puts similar results into groups. You can vary the number of groups by using the grop slider to go from a few general groups to many specific groups.
Having groups makes it easier to find relevant results, since you can usually ignore whole goups at a time, or find many relevant results together if you find a good group. You can search for relevant results just by looking at group descriptions instead of looking through results one-by-one. |
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