DEVONagent - 2.3.1

I thought long and hard about DEVONagent 2. And I mean long - six months or more.

At first, I confess, I was put off by what seemed like a high price and by the claims of an application that seemed to duplicate what Google used properly does. (And by some negative reviews.)

OTOH I was - and remain - extremely impressed with the company's responsiveness to my doubts and questions.

But (my fascination for) DEVONagent wouldn't go away. I found myself using it as first choice when I really wanted to get to grips with a subject for which materials were available on the web but usually get buried in the welter of Google's returns. I started to do some comparisons between the two sets of results and consistently found DEVONagent's more useful, better targeted and less 'noisy'.

Then I read the manual! I began to use some of the configurations not only for refining my searches (proximity, exclusion, grouping in particular), but also for saving, scheduling and fine-tuning specialized searches. The sheer power, flexibility and rich feature set of DEVONagent became more and more obvious. So too did the thought that has gone into the (interface and menu structure) design. I have a fast connection and get fast results.

The idea of custom plugins and search sets - e.g. for areas that particularly interest me (the arts, the Mac, the environment, history) is an exciting one. The notion that I remain in control of what gets filtered - e.g. the rejection of cartloads of index spam - is appealing. Expanding and adapting my searches, saving them and polishing what I get when (and having the results automatically emailed to me!) - these are winning features. And features alone which - go-ahead though it clearly is - Google is unlikely to provide on my desktop.

I don't suppose my 'conversion' experience is unusual. Like those of a really good friend, DEVONagent's benefits may not be immediately obvious. But they are legion. Definitely recommended.

I really like the idea of DevonAgent and the mission of Devon. I want to like DevonAgent and to be convinced it's worth the money. But my experience has been a little different from some of those here... Although I have a fast connection (Comcast cable) and find all other internet searches etc very quick, I often get the DevonAgent progress bar not completing. Nor am I yet convinced by the results; for example, I put in a couple of searches which I thought might expose DevonAgent's alleged advantages: "Simon Armitage" and "Schumann 4th Symphony". For the first Google took me to SA's home page as first result, DevonAgent to a minor site with many broken graphics. For the Schumann, Google straight to http://www.music.pomona.edu/orchestra/sch_4.htm while DevonAgent to a site that had little or nothing to do with what I was searching for, http://www.brainyhistory.com/topics/s/symphony.html. What might I be doing wrong: please convince me :-) Settings I have not made. These are typical terms - why is DevonAgent not performing as it's supposed to?