Happy Hunting What's hot on the World Wide Web

But I can't find anything useful on the Web!"That's the lament of ever more users as Web pages multiply likekudzu in a Carolina summer. Search engine HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com) now scans morethan 50 million pages in a search, and millions more are addedmonthly. So it's no surprise that even a simple hunt with astandard search engine can return huge numbers of hits.

But there is a smarter way to find information on the Web--newsoftware that can simultaneously access the main search engines,sort out duplicate hits, even rank sites by likely order ofusefulness. The best of this breed is Symantec's InternetFastFind (about $50, for Windows 95 and NT 4.0). It rushes throughAltaVista, Yahoo!, Excite, InfoSeek and more, then sorts anddisplays results as "hot links"--click on one and off yougo to the site for a look.

Quarterdeck's Web Compass (about $50, also for Windows 95and NT 4.0) does much the same--a bit more slowly, but with a moremuscular comprehensiveness. Web Compass taps into as many as 20search engines and directories simultaneously, and also providescapsule summaries for most of the hits it locates.