Tired of searching out new sites to find those elusive candidates? Try the “Informant,” a nifty service from Dartmouth College that e-mails you what you need. Registration and use of the service is free. The Informant performs periodic searches and e-mails you when pages corresponding to your keywords or URLs have been updated or added. You can enter up to three sets of keywords and choose which search engines to use. Let’s say you’re looking for COBOL people. Maybe you’d set up a query like resume.html AND cobol. And, maybe you’d want to try the same query with both Lycos and Alta Vista. After you type in your queries, the Informant will e-mail you a list of URLs that match your query the next day. Then, at your choice of 3, 7, 14, 30 or 60 days, the Informant will redo the search and e-mail you any new or updated pages that match your query. You can also specify up to five URLs you want to watch (perhaps your competitor’s?). When they’re updated, you’ll know. The e-mail notification you receive contains a URL that brings you to the Informant site. Once logged in, you’ll see a table that categorizes the pages by how closely they relate to your keywords. While it isn’t perfect, the Informant does save time. With the explosion of information on the Web, we’ll take anything that saves us even a few minutes. Next week: Bookmarking Framed Sites
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