excite.co.uk

Excite is one of those sites that has everything. I originally started with the thoughts of using it as a search engine. As soon as you see the site for the first time though, you'll notice just how much more than that it really is.

The first thing I noticed about it was its very complicated look. I just sat there thinking "Oh my God, where to now?". No, not really, it wasn't quite that bad. Although there is always a lot packed in to their pages. Its easy enough to understand.

Pages are very colourful when compared to other similar sites. They mostly stick to a orange/yellow and blue scheme, which isn't bad at all.

You can see what you're gonna get, just from opening up the home page. There is a lot of stuff listed here, just about everything you're going to get actually. Its contents include things like:

FREE E-MAIL - I now have my email account with them and haver had no troubles yet. I have found that it sometimes takes a little while for things to reach me, but its generally very good. You can personalize your account in many ways such as by changing your colour scheme and things like that (there are 15 to choose from). The e-mail is also kind of cluttered, with lots on one page. I would prefer it if things were a little more spread out, but I suppose it's worth putting up with this when everything else works so well.

THE SEARCH MODE - Like many other search engines, EXCITE has its search thingy situated at the top of the screen, right there in the middle. Easy to find as you'd expect, as this is probably many peoples main reason for visiting the site. I would prefer it though if the box was a little bigger. You can fit just about as much as you want in to the space provided, but I'd prefer to be able to see all of what I've wrtitten, instead of just the last couple of words.

FREE SMS - A few of them are doing this now. They allow you to send text messages to any UK mobile phone, without paying a penny. You don't have to register or anything, just 1 click away from the home page and you're there. Just put in the number, and write whatever you want (up to 162 characters long).

FUN STUFF - I think that this is a really fun sight for young people. At 21, I'm a little too old for some of it, but for anyone younger, or just anyone in the world who is naive enough to believe it, there's some great love games. Basically these involve putting in the names of 2 people, and the computer will come up with all sorts of love match kind of things (I obviously had to have a little go, just so I could tell you about it). Apart from this, theres all sorts of taro readings, and other things with magic stons, crystal balls, fortune cookies and the like. Also, there's things like horoscopes. You'll just have to chek them out if you're into that sort of thing. There are millions of them.

NEWS AND WEATHER - The site has a large number of news reports, based on all sorts of things. Sport, shares (for which there is also a listing at the bottom of the home page), and the days weather forcast. For today in London it says 2/4 degrees and cloudy. I'm not sure quite how accurate that is, but if anyone would like to let me know, I'd be grateful.

Anyway, back to thesearching. The site is one of the fastest, and contains a fair range of information. Unlike most other search engines (eg. yahoo), it gives you the choice of searching the UK sites, EUROPEAN, the whole of the web, or just for news. This set-up hasn't really proved useful to me yet, but I'm sure that for some people it might.