The Mechanical Bull v1.0

What's New?

Check out the Bull List for listings of other mechanical bull related web sites.

What Is The Mechanical Bull

The Mechanical Bull is a tool that lets you easily search for information on the web. It has been designed specifically for searching for rodeo terms, but it can be used to search for almost anything.

The Mechanical Bull is a front end web page that uses its own Javascript functions to perform a search. There are no CGI calls made except those to the search engines themselves, so you could keep the Mechanical Bull window open all the time without worrying about the server load of my hosting ISP.

What Can The Bull Search?

Right now the bull can send search queries to the following sites: Alta Vista, Yahoo, Infoseek, Infoseek Ultra, Webcrawler, Lycos, Excite, Magellan, Deja News, Metacrawler, HotBot, The New Yahoo Search Engine .

Limitations Of The Bull

The Mechanical Bull will only work on a web browser that handles JavaScript. Other affects that I used include a Cascading Style Sheet. So your two most popular browser choices are Internet Explorer 3.0, followed by Netscape Navigator.

How To Use The Bull

Clicking on the button on the bottom of the screen opens up the window for The Mechanical Bull. To run a search, do the following...

Choose a search engine through the selection list.
Select any default terms you want the bull to search for (rodeo, etc...)
Enter in your search string in the text field.
Click Outside to begin the search.

From there, your output will appear in this window. If you want to modify your search, you can change anything immediately and re-run the search.

Getting On The Bull

If your browser can handle JavaScript, there should be a button below this paragraph that you can click to launch the bull.

The Original Mechanical Bull

Technically, this isn't the first site to go by this name. A long time ago there was a web site known as The Mechanical Bull Free For All, which was an index of web sites that you could immediately append URLs to. It's no longer out there as far as I can tell, but it was an interesting site that deserved mentioning.

Testing

Since JavaScript is at best an eveolving language, there is a chance that the Mechanical Bull may not be 100 percent compatable with your system. The bull has been successfully tested on IE 3.0 and Netscape 3.0 (Windows) without any adverse affects.

The only error that the bull currently cannot handle is having the secondary window closed. If that happens, you will need to close the bull window, reopen a new window, and then open up the bull window again. (Yes, I am working on trying to fix this problem).

Other Info

Feedback

Comments welcome. Bug notifications appreciated.

Send email to cpj1@visi.com