http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1507/pcmg0078.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)

PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996

Infoseek Corp.: Infoseek Professional

William Gaines

This Web-based news-searching tool combines solid sources, natural-language searching, and a great price. It's a subscription version of the popular Infoseek Internet search service with a Personal Newswire feature that lets you name and save searches for access whenever you log on to the site.

To get started with Infoseek, you register a user ID, a password, and a payment method. For $4.95 per month, you get 50 transactions, usually enough for a useful Personal Newswire. After that, each query costs 10 cents. This basic plan gets you standard sources including AP, BusinessWire, Newsbytes, and Reuters Business Report, as well as more-specialized and Internet collections. Premium sources, such as Edge, Hoover's Company Profiles, and SoftBase, carry additional subscription fees.

Searching involves choosing a source collection and entering a query. Infoseek claims you can search using plain English sentences; it doesn't support Boolean operators or wild cards. Simplified proximity searching is possible with quotation marks and brackets, and you can specify date limitations for the articles retrieved.

Most of our simple searches met with success, especially after we consulted the extensive online tips on how to search, but our attempts at natural language searching (for example, "What's happening in Bosnia") yielded either no articles or inappropriate ones.

To make a personal news service useful, you need to save searches for repeat use. This is where Personal Newswire comes in. To set up your Personal Newswire, you simply run a query. The top link on the results page is Save Query in my Personal Newswire; when you click on it, you're prompted for a title for the query, any changes you want to make to it, and its position on your Personal Newswire page.

Article headlines in the Personal Newswire table of contents are organized in relevance order. Within the articles, the search terms are highlighted.

Web surfers will find Infoseek Professional a good fit. Access to a wide range of sources including other Web sites and newsgroups helps keep you on top of the Internet. At $4.95 a month, Infoseek is a bargain.

Infoseek Professional. List price: $4.95 with 50 transactions per month; additional transactions, 10 cents each. Infoseek Corp., Santa Clara, CA; 800-781-4636, 408-567-2700; fax, 408-986-1889; http://www.infoseek .com.

Suitability to Task

Infoseek Professional

Ease of setup        Good
Customizability      Fair
Quality of delivery  Good

Topic Strength

U.S. news            **
World news           ***
Business             *
Sports               **
Arts & entertainment *
Technology           ***