DEVONtechnologies has released a new beta version of DEVONagent, bringing it to version b2. DEVONagent is a utility designed to be an automatic user defined search assistant. The latest beta release features numerous enhancements including a new "scanner" addition and improved searching. According to DEVONtechnologies:
Just one week after the first public beta release of DEVONagent, DEVONtechnologies publishes DEVONagent Public Beta 2 with a total of 35 new functions and improvements and more than 20 major and minor bug fixes.
Based on DEVONtechnologiesi revolutionary DEVONtechnology, DEVONagent is the information finding tool of the next generation. It simulates the behaviour of a human Web surfer scanning the Internet for a specific piece of information.
DEVONagent 1.0b2 introduces separate windows for queries and crawlers, a new concept called "scanners" and comes with new plug-ins for German literature (project Gutenberg), Mac Web pages, images and the Apple Cocoa-Dev mailing list.
Also, itis possible to open new browser windows independent from queries or crawlers, effectively making DEVONagent a very simple alternative Web browser (lacking e.g. bookmarks and download functionality).
Scanners post-process the found results to filter out for example only pages with thumbnail galleries, Web-cams or links to software archives. This further improves the quality of the results.
Also, Beta 2 understands two new operators, "before" and "after", converts RSS and RDF data on-the-fly to HTML and automatically filters out pages with only buzzwords and no real content. A "Cached files" agent makes it possible to search cached pages, and a history pop-up menu remembers the last 25 query terms.
You can find more information about the DEVONagent beta release at the DEVONtechnologies Web site. DEVONagent is available as freeware.