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Saying that Copernic is a search bot wouldn't be much. You'd think it's something like WebFerret. Well, it is... only on steroids. In fact, Copernic is pretty much a full-blown application and probably as complete as they (search bots) come. At the present state of things, that is. Because things develop at the speed of light on the Internet, and what is state of the art today, may well be outdated prehistory tomorrow.
Software Review - Pros
Copernic, if used proficiently, may cut your online time (and, consequently, ISP expenses) substantially. Depending on how much of your online time is spent in searching. You can virtually issue a search and go to lunch, and when you come back, your results will all be neatly downloaded to your computer - every searcher's dream.
Copernic is one of the very few Internet utilities I've come across that will actually - if you have configured Internet Explorer to use a proxy - work both through your proxy or bypassing it. That's probably because Copernic simply doesn't need to go through your browser to accomplish its tasks. Nonetheless, it remains something of a mystery to me how it manages to query search engines and still remain totally independent of your proxy settings. Hats off to the programming crew!
Software Review - Cons
Copernic crashes from time to time, and we're talking serious crashes here, with nice blue SODs and all that. Not to mention its built-in browser substitute which sometimes simply freezes, because it can't handle certain HTML documents that even the dumb Internet Explorer displays perfectly.
Copernic can't limit the bandwith it uses and it makes no difference if you set it to use your proxy or to bypass it. So, given that it uses up all your Internet resources pretty quickly - just imagine querying, say, 10 search engines simultaneously over a 28.8 k dial-up connection, and downloading their results... - it virtually prevents you from doing any other Internet-related tasks while it's working. You can't even surf contemporarily. You do have some rudimentary control over that - by limiting the number of simultaneous transfers - but nothing nearly as effective as the limit download speed toggle in the FlashGet download manager.
The Confirmations dialog of the Options menu is misleading: in fact, though you set all confirmations (and specifically: though you select its Confirm before deleting searches and results option), Copernic will never ask you if it may delete "outdated" searches - upon exiting, it will simply delete them without confirmation. This is a potential nuisance if you have a bulky downloaded search occupying, say, 500 MB on your drive. Of course, you may simply instruct Copernicnever to delete "outdated" searches at all and do that yourself, on a per-search basis, when you don't need them anymore. But that's like missing the point, right? After all, why use machines at all if you can't automate even the simplest of tasks?
The results listing really should allow you to sort the pages by date - very often, it's the most recent pages on a certain subject that we're after. I don't think this would be too hard to implement - maybe by making use of the HTTP headers: at least as regards the already verified and downloaded pages (the so-called automated tasks).
Speaking of which: Copernic sometimes doesn't perform its automated task. For instance, if you set its automated task to be Download documents, it will perform the search, but won't download the documents it found. Frustrating.
You can stop the download process, but cannot pause it! Imagine that! If you get disconnected accidentally - kaboom! - you have to download all the web documents again! Really smart... :{
If you use a proxy, configure Copernic to bypass it - otherwise, when your browser or other communication software tries to use your Internet connection as well, Copernic may go into a sort of "buffer overrun" when downloading files and simply skip a long list of servers, unduly marking them as "unreachable".
Although Copernic claims to "prune" the results for duplicates, you'll still get loads of identical (duplicate) files among your downloads.
Test Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
General
If Copernic crashes on you in the middle of a download job, you'll lose its results list, of course - but not the documents it has already downloaded. Just dig into your Program Files\Copernic 2001 Pro\Data\Default User\Default\%n%\ directory (where %n% is the highest number - Copernic numbers its searches sequentially from 1 up, so the newest download job will have the highest number), and there you'll find all the HTML documents Copernic has managed to download heroically before it was defeated by the overpowering forces of the relentless general Protection Fault!
Don't configure Copernic to use its built-in browser, because it's prone to stumble and fall, taking down Copernic too. Use your system default browser instead. That way, even if it does crash, at least it won't take down Copernic with it.
