FirstStop WebSearch Standard Edition

If you like your search software lean and mean, this is the best option currently available. Through WebSearch you can use all the top search engines: Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and All The Web, any of which can be switched off or on at a click.

You can save your results for later, verify them to check for links to pages that don’t exist any more or filter in or out particular sites. This makes for a very powerful search suite offering key options that, once you’ve tried them, you won’t want to live without.

Fortunately, all this power has not lead to a compromise on efficiency. If you want to bypass the software, you can initiate a search directly from Internet Explorer and have your results displayed here, too. However, there’s something neat about keeping all your results in a separate window, so you can open the pages in a browser without losing your list of potential sites to visit. There are also options that allow you to set things up exactly how you want them – from how regularly you check for updates to the software through to the way your search results are displayed.

The one downside is that there is no UK specific search option, something that’s particularly apparent if you change from the standard web search to a news search – the news sites used in this are oriented towards the US and not even the internationally revered BBC makes an entry.

Without offering too many useless options to overwhelm the user or encourage them to upgrade to a paid version, the standard edition of WebSearch is a powerful tool capable of enhancing your internet experience. Well worth the download, which is free as long as you’re a home user.