Go Get It!

GO FETCH!

A Review of Go Get It!

by Ron Enderland

So youre sick and tired of watching that little modem icon in your

Start Menu tray glow green while you patiently wait for those URLs to

download, huh? Youre weary of getting a glom of graphics when all you

really want is good old information, huh? Youve had it with typing in

a series of words in a search engine and getting 104,367 matches, huh?

Well, have I got a program for you. Go-Get-It may just be what youve

been waiting for.

The premise behind Go-Get-It is that you have better things to do than

manually hitting links and then sitting around waiting for info to download.

This handy-dandy little app handles such mundane chores for you. And, I

might add, it does so quite nicely.

One of your search options is Keyword Search. You are prompted to

select any or all of three search engines: Lycos, Alta Vista, and Yahoo.

These are a fair representation of search sites, although there are several

other excellent ones that are left out. Perhaps Nortech will provide optional

engine choices for those of you who insist on Web Crawler or Infoseek.

The way the program operates, though, youre not aware of the search

site itself. You simply get the results.

The results arrive in the form of documents which download to your hard

drive. As a result, you can send Go-Get-It after keywords, individual pages,

entire sites, and/or the links which tie to the pages that youve downloaded.

How do they do that? you may ask. Well, the answer is astonishingly

fast! Really, its no secret, though.

You see, Go-Get-It retrieves text only, no graphics. The descriptions

of the graphics (and their layout, if encoded into the pages HTML) appear

on the pages that you retrieve.

Once you have downloaded the requested documents, you can check them

out (off-line, if you like) through the built-in viewer. If youve downloaded

a site, then you can just hit links to jump from page to page. You can

copy text and URL locations with the viewer, although the Windows hot keys

dont work. Youll have to hit the copy buttons on the toolbar.

You can also set up your own personal newspaper through Updates. You

can set Go-Get-It up to retrieve certain web pages and store them in your

update folder. When you instruct it to Retrieve Updates, then it will

go out and look at the pages and download them if theyve changed. In this

manner, you can have a folder full of fresh documents to look at your leisure.

Keep in mind, though, that you wont get the graphics.

Go-Get-It seems to do what Nortech claims, and it does it well. My folders

were quickly filled with pages, even with my rickety old 14,400 modem.

It will compact the folders for you, too, so that hard drive space doesnt

vanish too quickly. Incidentally, Go-Get-It itself requires a paltry 1.5

MEG of space for installation.

It will also search the USENET groups, if you like. You can narrow the

search down to certain groups, individuals who posted, or subjects. It

fires up and runs smoothly on TCP/IP as well as on AOL 3.0. It supposedly

also works on MSN and Compuserve PPP accounts, but I didnt have the opportunity

to try them.

An upgrade is promised that will retrieve graphics if you so desire.

Also, the current program is sixteen-bit. A thirty-two-bit version is on

the way. These improvements will complete the presentation, and, if well

done, will push this nifty agent app into the five-world range. Even in

its present incarnation, the $39.95 that you invest will quickly be paid

back in the form of saved personal and connect time.

Windows PC 3.x, 95 or NT Internet access