Question about Searching Strategies

I am a gross “under-achiever” when it comes to using Devon Agent but I’m convinced it’s me and not DevonAgent.

Every day or so I use DevonAgent to do a search but I usually get no better results than I would with Google. By “better,” I mean less irrelevant hits. Here’s a practical example…

I am considering buying a college textbook store and I want to see if anyone has written anything about the future of that business on the Internet. (For example, an article that predicted the demise of the industry due to online purchases would certainly be relevant! Likewise, an article that explained how “brick and morter” stores could use the Internet to its advantage would also be relevant.

Using DevonAgent, I searched “future of textbook business” (no quotes) and got back what appears to be no better than I got from a Google search. I assume I don’t really know how to use DevonAgent because it’s not saving me the time it’s apparently saving other people who write rave reviews.

Can anyone in this forum suggest ways to conduct this search using DevonAgent? For example, should I put some words in quotes or ??

Also, I’m unclear about the different tabs in DevonAgent. (Pages, Digest, Log). How are these to be used?

Thanks in advance.

Scott

Try using some of DEVONagent’s built-in operators, such as AND/OR/NOT/BEFORE/NEAR/AFTER, to filter your searches. For example, using the phrase “future BEFORE textbook NEAR store” came up with a few pertinent pages I did not see in a google search.