Copernic Agent tips: Adding Google to search engines list etc.

Copernic Agent is a very nice meta-search tool that can simultaneously search using multiple search engines.

It can help you organize your searches, filter search results, track search results for future changes (last one is available at the Professional version only, not at the free Basic version or at the intermediate Personal version) etc.

Here are some useful tips if you’re using it:

• Copernic Agent by default doesn’t show Google to the list of multiple search engines you can use for searching. The following workaround is from Copernic support:

Create a update.reg file with a text editor (make sure it doesn’t append .txt to the file when you save it else use folder options to have Windows always show file extensions and then remove the .txt file extension so that the file extension is .reg and not .reg.txt)

 REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Copernic\Agent\System] "EngineUpdateAddress"="http://updates.copernic.com/k2upd/agentex" 

Save the file and then double-click it to run it. Windows will ask you if you want to update the registry, say OK.

Then launch Copernic Agent, go to Tools menu and selection menu action “Check for Search Engine Updates”. After update finishes check the Quick Search tab, where it says “N engines enabled” and click that link to see dialog with more engines to enable for Copernic Agent’s search. Google will now be one of the checkboxes there, check it and press OK (will remember it at next search).

WARNING: seems if you use the above registry update with the NEW (and now free) Copernic Agent Personal it removes various search engines from different categories (including TV and Web). Maybe it still has older updates there that were for Copernic Agent Basic only or for the older Personal version. Wonder what the correct engine updates URL is for the new version. Commenting out the entry above in registry and doing search engines update again doesn’t fix the issue. Probably have to uninstall Copernic then and reinstall again.

• Do select from menus the Result/Filter command. That shows a filter toolbar above the results list. This allows you to checkmark interesting results and then select checkmarked from the Status dropdown list at the filtering toolbar to only see previously checkmarked results from that specific search.
• Very useful is also the Folders pane where you can organize searches in categories (it would be even nicer if you could organize searches using tags and have virtual folders autogenerated based on the tags as in Delicious bookmarks browser add-on).
• Update: A cool shortcut I just found by accident is that apart from double-clicking a search to edit its parameters and re-launch it, you can double-click in the empty space at the end of a previous searches list to open a new search window.