Are You Copernic Conscious?

© 2004, John Calder
http://www.TheEzine.net

Often overlooked by Internet marketers, software manufacturer Copernic Technologies offers some great tools for market and competition research. The company seems to concentrate on corporate markets, as they're not a household name in the same way that "Norton" is, and their products aren't generally available through retail channels.

Copernic recently released their desktop search tool. This product is available now, is free, and creates a searchable index of many documents on your home computer, including email, MS Office documents, text files, PDF, and others. The program runs resident in memory so that in can update its index on the fly. You can optionally add a search box to your taskbar. This is the first entry in an approaching battle for desktop search. Microsoft has announced that desktop search will be integrated with future releases of Windows. And Google has a desktop search tool in beta, but it's not yet as capable as the Copernic search tool is.

But Copernic's real strength is in their Agent and Summarizer products. Copernic Agent, available in free Basic, and paid Personal and Professional versions, is a desktop based meta-search tool for the web. With it, you can search multiple search engines simultaneously, with all results sorted by relevance. The more advanced the version, the more options you have for searching, organizing, filtering, and saving the results.

The Copernic Summarizer can improve your efficiency by creating summaries of the important text portions of web pages, PDF documents, email, and Word files. You can even have a small floating pane on your desktop that instantly offers web page summaries. As with their Agent software, you can save and email summarization results.

Agent Pro and Summarizer together offer a powerful research tool that could offer Internet marketers an advantage.