SJC & Co are a long established DataFlex developer with almost 20 years DataFlex and Visual DataFlex programming experience. This dates back to the late 1980’s with version DataFlex 2.3b when Simon Coyne, proprietor of SJC & Co was on industrial placement as part of his degree course.
Simon first started thinking about the search engine management field in 2004 when he realised that you could have a directory of not only Internet search engines, but website search engines, website database search engines and even Websites web pages pages. The resulting Search Engine Explorer Version 1 was released in 2005.
Simon says “I anticipated that the search engine market would diversify and more and more websites would have search facilities available. This has come true so far and I expect this to continue expanding over the next few years. So, for example, with Search Engine Explorer, for the health industry you could add search engine types for each health industry sector. Within these types you could add the details of the search related to websites that were relevant to each health industry sector”.
Staying with the theme of shopping, and moving beyond personal usage, Search Engine Explorer allows any company or organisation to be able to add all the websites relating to their regular or approved suppliers to a search list and then be able to search just those for a product at the touch of a button, then scroll through and retain the results.
Search Engine Explorer’s search management comes with 75 search engines pre- configured, and new search engines can be added by the user. Up to 20 can be specified for any particular search. This means that each company organisation and even each department within each company organisation can manage its own preferred list of search engines and web sites to be searched as pre-configured searches.
Why Visual DataFlex?
As well as long term experience with DataFlex and Visual DataFlex, Simon also programs in Java. Simon says “I have found Visual DataFlex much the easier to develop applications with as the commands are more English like. This also means you get easier knowledge transfer when it comes to passing your work onto someone else. Plus, Visual DataFlex provides many very high level facilities that you would have to build for yourself in other languages. For example, before embarking on Search Engine Explorer I tested the supplied web browser package (cComwebbrower.pkg) as this was mission critical to the product and with this working it saved a huge amount of development time that I could then put into Search Engine Explorer itself. From a usability point of view, the Visual DataFlex development studio has now matured into a development product that is well up to the standard of the Java NetBeans IDE, if not better.”
Search Engine Explorer - a successful Web Searching Tool
With no advertising, and just the Internet and word of mouth, Search Engine Explorer has had a steady stream of downloads and sales. What’s more, it has already had many accolades from the computing press, as a glance at this website page will reveal, with commendations from SoftHypermarket, Shareware Connection, EuroDownload.com, SoftForAll and several others.
This year with the release of v4.1 SJC & Co is going to start pro-active marketing to companies and organisations with over 500 employees This should see sales dramatically increase - where the Internet is concerned, the sky is the limit for a popular product! The low cost single user Search Engine Explorer download (available as a free evaluation download) uses the Visual DataFlex Single user distribution licence, a low cost licence designed just for this purpose - developers can distribute unlimited single user copies of applications with this distribution license.
The Internet search tools market is a fledgling market and not very many people have even heard of an Internet search tool let alone used one, or even realised that they might benefit from one. For anyone who is into serious research, or needing to organise regular searches of specific lists of web sites, Search Engine Explorer is a must. Plus, the explorer stores the search results, search pages, websites and pages visited together with the search requests instead of these just lasting as long as your browser stays pointing to the results list. This means that once you have found what you are looking for on the Internet using Search Engine Explorer it stays found.
The new version, Search Engine Explorer v 4.1 , developed in Visual DataFlex 2008 releases on the 11 April 2009. The Search Engine Explorer website can be found at http://www.searchengineexplorer.com/
For more information on Visual DataFlex, contact sales@asckey.com or call +44 (0) 8701 634466
Asckey Data Services Ltd May 2009