September 28, 2000
Many products are introduced that claim to help you in your Web surfing. Accelerators like TurboSurfer and NetSonic, bookmark managers, and the like. Some help a little, some a lot, but nothing as awesomely unique as a tool we've found with the unlikely name of UCmore. It's not a screen enhancement utility as you might guess from the name. It's a super-slick search utility. Unlike other search add-on utilities (Copernic) you don't have to actually perform any searches! UCmore gives you instant access to sites that relate in some useful way to the site you are currently viewing. It does this unobtrusively, automatically, and nearly instantly.
Consider the following examples:
Example #1 - I downloaded and installed UCmore on my wife's computer. Both the download and the install were very quick. She's a quilter and when she went to one of her bookmarked quilting sites the UCmore toolbar quickly populated itself with the following categories: Quilting, Supplies, Clubs and Guilds, Applique, Crazy Quilts, Paper Piecing, and Publications. Each category had as many as ten Web sites listed on the pull-down menus. Without having to switch to Google or AltaVista and run any searches, use any keywords, or know anything about Boolean logic she instantly had nearly 80 relates sites all sorted into useful categories. She told me this would save her a lot of time tracking down sites of interest in the future.
Example #2 - I showed UCmore to Jim here at TNPC. He was researching facts for an article he was working on. He was using the CyberAtlas site and wanted to find other sites that offered similar information to CyberAtlas. Once he installed UCmore it put up a number of related sites on the UCmore toolbar. Without having to go through the search engines, file not founds, irrelevant links, etc., he was able to find a number of relevant sites automatically.
Describing what this product does is difficult so I took some screen shots of the two examples we used. You can find them at:
http://www.thenakedpc.com/t/320/tr.cgi?fprod1
Others have tried to come up with this type of utility before. Most notably was the original Alexa. Netscape's "What's Related" button also comes to mind but they both miss the mark when compared to the speed, usefulness, or interface of UCmore.
The only real downside is that UCmore only installs on Internet Explorer. There is no Navigator version at this time. Here at TNPC we've started using UCmore as part of our daily routine and have found it genuinely useful.
You can download UCmore here (remember it's for Internet Explorer users only!): http://www.thenakedpc.com/t/320/tr.cgi?fprod
