Metasearch Engine Review: Open Text's Query Server

If you've been accessing the web since the mid-90's, you've heard of Open Text. It was one of the first major search engines on the Internet, developed by a company of the same name. Eventually, the Open Text Company decided to change its focus and concentrate on selling their search systems to businesses, and the Open Text search engine disappeared.

Query Server is one of the products Open Text is selling, but it's also a nifty metasearch engine, available to anyone who searches the web. In addition to providing general web metasearches, it offers specialized metasearches of four subject areas - health, news, government and money. Everything about Query Server is, clear, compact, efficient and fast. When you use it, you know you're in the hands of a professional.

Web Search: (To get to the search page, click on Web under Search Pages on the upper left side of the page.) Query Server accesses 10 major search engines - AltaVista, AOL, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST, HotBot, MSN, Northern Light, Sprinks, and Yahoo! (Notably missing is Google.) You can choose to search any number of these engines.

Search Tips

There's a drop-down menu under the search box with the choices All of the above terms - to require that all the words you enter appear in each result and Any of the above terms - to return results with all or any number of the search words.

Query Server supports quotation marks to enclose phrases, the Boolean operators AND, OR , NOT and NEAR and the asterisk to search for web pages that contain your search word followed by any ending (e.g., invest* will retrieve items containing investor, investing, investment, etc.)

There is also a menu for choosing the maximum number of results you want to retrieve, another which which lets you choose how long the search should last, and a third menu that gives you three options for organizing the result clusters (groups of results) that Query Server returns to you - by content (subject), by site and content, and by site.

Results with Added Value

The organization, clarity and informativeness of Query Servers's results add greatly to their usefulness, and reduce the time it takes to find the most relevant results for your purposes. Items retrieved from a search all appear on the same page, and are arranged in groups called result clusters.

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