November 4, 1998 by John Engler & Misha Sakellaropoulo SRP: $59.95 + $5.05 s/h Connectix Corporation Surf Express Deluxe Download 1.1.5->1.5 Update Pros: best caching method for all web browsers, noticeable speed gains, fast & convenient searching that rivals Sherlock Cons: doesn't support 68K Macs, only works with version 3.0 browsers and higher

    Connectix Surf Express Deluxe consists of two products: Surf Express 1.5 and SuperSonic Search. Surf Express 1.5 is the latest version of the popular web browsing utility that speeds up the browsing experience for modem users by using a more efficient caching system. SuperSonic Search is Connectix's attempt at creating an all-in-one search engine that features the best of all search engines in one tidy package.

Surf Express 1.5

    Surf Express is an extension based utility that overrides Netscape and Internet Explorer's caching system with its own, speedier method. Caching is the process that the browser uses to access pages or images stored on the hard drive when you previously visited the site. While you may be skeptical of the benefits such an improved system offers, anyone using a modem connection to the internet will quickly notice an increase in the speed of their web experience with Surf Express installed.

    Surf Express works seamlessly and in the background between your browser and the internet, downloading images and text quickly, and storing them for faster retrieval in case you visit that site again. If you visit a lot of the same sites over and over you'll notice a drastic improvement in your browsing speed as Surf Express "adapts" to your surfing habits. If you casually drift with the tides while on the internet you'll still see some improvement in speed, although not as much as a surfer with a consistent repertoire of sites.

    Although Connectix claims that your web surfing experience will be up to 36x speedier, don't expect your 56k modem to be outperforming any ISDN, cable, or T1 lines. The process of connecting to the server and receiving the information takes just as long. In fact, it's difficult to establish the actual speed improvement that Surf Express gives you since it fluctuates, but you will indeed notice a difference.

    Under the Advanced options you can set your cache size (the larger the better), you can set the maximum image size you want to store (again, the larger the better). If you turn on "Smart Fetch" Surf Express will try and learn your browsing habits and preload those sites that you visit most often, though in practice this feature is hard to tweak and use effectively.

    Surf Express 1.5 is a free update for previous owners of Surf Express 1.x. The major difference between the two is faster caching, although version 1.5 adds a control strip module that lets you quickly see how Surf Express is being used.

SuperSonic Search vs. Sherlock

    SuperSonic Search is the other component of Surf Express Deluxe and works by using multiple search engines (five of the largest) to search the web in one small, convenient window. It then returns the results inside your browser. There's no doubt that SuperSonic Search is faster than traditional searching, but how does it compare to Sherlock?

    For one thing, SuperSonic Search has a much more high-tech feel to it. As it searches the web and receives the results you'll be treated to a futuristic movie complete with sounds for the appropriate tasks that it is performing. Beyond the visual differences, SuperSonic Search offers some other advantages over Sherlock. For one thing, there are no advertisement banners in the results. Also, Sherlock has the interesting tendency of giving HotBot pages a much higher, and misleading, relevance rating while not giving Lycos pages any rating. SuperSonic Search doesn't suffer from this problem, so you can be assured that the most relevant pages are shown in order in regards to the information submitted to the search engines by the site owner.

    One major advantage of Sherlock is it's modularity. There's no way of adding search engines or specific site's search engines to SuperSonic Search. Even so, if you take Steve Jobs' statement that Sherlock is worth the $99 8.5 upgrade price by itself, then SuperSonic Search represents a more affordable approach to a similar idea.

Conclusion

    For those of you who are looking to improve the speed of your web browsing experience, Surf Express Deluxe is an excellent product to consider regardless of what version of the Mac OS you are using. However, users running Mac OS 8.5 might want to opt for sticking simply with Surf Express 1.5 rather than the deluxe version.

This graphic shows the different approaches that SuperSonic Search and Sherlock employ to list their results. (click to enlarge).