UltraRecall vs Web Research... my findings

Posted by JJ
Jul 11, 2007 at 06:46 PM

INTRODUCTION
I have used many software products including:

Used Extensively:
OmeaPro, UltraRecall, Web Research, Net Snippets, Onfolio, Commence

Used but not extensively:
OneNote, ADM, MyInfo, Zoot16, MyBase, Surfulator

Currently I’m using both UltraRecall and Web Research. After using the other products, I find these are closest at meeting my needs (listed below) and are still being developed.

REQUIREMENTS
I’m looking for a single product solution to collect, index and recall information.
Information sources include:
Web pages (40%)
Documents (word, excel, powerpoint & pdf) (30%)
Text Notes (Note I type in… “Yellow Sticky Notes” (15%)
Email (From Outlook) (15%)

TEST RESULTS
I have conducted a few informal, yet “real world” tests with both UR & WR.

Saving a document:

Time to Save into product:

1 MB Word doc UR~6 secs WR~3 secs
15MB PowerPoint UR~12 secs WR~45 secs
35 MB AVI file UR~20 secs WR~240 secs

Comments:
It seems WR is slightly faster on saving small docs.
UR is much faster at saving larger doc/files.
WR is unacceptable for larger files.
NOTE-WR suggests not stored files/docs larger than 15MB

Time to save & quality of capture web pages using FireFox:

Orbitz.com (a schedule of flights & times NY-LA) UR~60 secs (Quality – Unacceptable: did not capture tables with flight info) WR~35 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly)

Drudgereport.com (front page) UR~40 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly) WR~6 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly)

Taunton.com (front page) UR~32 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly) WR~5 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly)

GPSlodge.com (product review) UR~40 secs (Quality – Poor: missed several pictures and formatting was off) WR~15 secs (Quality – Good: missed one banner ad)

Hertz.com (front page) UR~40 secs (Quality – Unacceptable: did not capture page. It only captured a JavaScript Warning) WR~8 secs (Quality – Excellent: captured the entire page correctly)

Comments:
UR was consistently much slower at capturing web pages. More importantly, too often, UR did not capture the web page information correctly. WR was much faster & did capture all the pages.

MY IMPRESSIONS/OPINIONS:

Referring back to information sources:

Web Page Captures:
WR is clearly the winner here. Much faster & more reliable. (No surprise here since the product was designed to capture web pages.)

What is surprising is the performance of UR. When I use UR to capture a page, I must always go back into UR to confirm the capture… I just don’t have confidence in the capture with UR. Plus it is sooo slow & I like to capture lots of pages.

On the UI side, WR is much better. It allows you to “save as” before capturing a web page. UR only allows you to save into the “imported items” folder in the active database.

Storing documents:
UR is clearly the winner here. Much faster & can handle large files.
WR is fine if your files are less than 15MB, but many of my excel, pdf and powerpoint files are larger. WR is unacceptable for larger files.

NOTE: You need the Network Add-in in WR to index the docs.

“Sticky Notes”
There a few minor differences…
One thing I like about WR is when you add a new note, you can add a horizontal line in the text. I know this is small, but I like it to separate different thoughts in the same note with a line. BUT… if you edit an existing note, the button to add a line is not available… go figure???

UR is easier to edit an existing note… just click in the note and start typing. With WR you need to select the note & click on the edit button to enter the edit mode.

Emails
UR & WR both do a good job.

One difference is WR will save any attachments that are attached to the email into WR, UR does not.

OTHER FEATURES
Clearly UR has more power & flexibility with their use of meta data. For me this is nice, but I use it only occasionally.

One nice feature of WR is the ability to assign multiple categories to the same item. (Plus the categories are arranged in a tree format) In UR you can only assign 1 category to an item. You can use linking to “assign” multiple categories, but WR has a far cleaner approach.

WR also has a simple scanner interface that allows you to scan docs directly into WR. One limitation is that it only allows you to save the scan as a .jpg file not pdf. Nice feature, but not too important to me.

CONCLUSIONS
I wish there was a clear winner, so I could use just one product. For web clipping WR is better… for saving docs/files UR is better…

In my particular case, since more of my info is coming from the web, I think I will go with WR for now and deal with the limitations of adding smaller files to my database… (at least until UR is updated OR a new product comes along…Zoot 32???)

In a perfect world… I wish UR was better at web captures….

Hope you found this helpful…

-jj