excite.co.uk

Like Yahoo, Excite is another one of those sites, which has everything. In my tedious hours of boredom at college, I have spent a lot of time looking around, just checking out new sites. This one is by no means new, but I only started visiting it very recently when it was pointed out by a friend (a 20 year old friend who used to play around with the 12 year old girl ‘love’ stuff that they have there – you’ll see what I mean if you take a look).

Excite is actually a quite ‘jam packed’ site and quite colourful. It will surely cheer you up on a rainy day (if you’re a weirdo).

My first intentions were to check out the search engine quality. It was no disappointment. Although jot up to the speed of Google or Yahoo, Excite isn’t that far behind. They repeatedly gave me good results, and I have found very few dead links. Only improvement that they could add, is a bigger text box. If you’re typing in more than about 3 words, then they start to roll back away from the edge, so you can only see the last couple of words. If you’re typing fast, this can make it difficult, as you can’t see if you’ve made any spelling mistakes (without scrolling back along anyway). This is kind of made up for though, by the excellent advanced search capabilities.

Apart from the search facility, they offer a range of extras.

Free SMS is becoming one of the more popular additions these days. Loads of places have it, and this one at Excite is very good. I’ve sent a few, and they’ve never taken that long. They normally get there straight away, much faster than Lycos. You are allowed to send 3 a day, which is perhaps a bit limiting, and you have to be a member to send them (registration is very simple though).

I have many email accounts, and one is with Excite. I must say that it is nothing special, but gets the job done well enough. I receive no SPAM (which I don’t for all apart from my Hotmail one), and messages, from what I can tell, are always sent on time, although not instantly. As with other like Another.com, you can personalise your account in a number of ways, one of which is the colour change. There are 15 schemes to choose from, which I think is plenty. Pages here can be very cluttered, which again, is the only thing really wrong with it. I prefer just to be able to see things clearly when reading my mail. Excite is however, definitely not the easiest to understand.

Excite is one of the only sites where I've seen the weather forcast. An interesting feature this one. Not so useful for me, living in Cornwall, but the Excite homepage actually has a brief weather summary for the London area, which is updated each day. The site has a large number of news reports, based on all sorts of things including sports and shares.

This site is a great one for anyone who believes in the stars, taro readings, and love match thingies. Some of these can be quite fun (I didn’t say that ok?!). They basically have the same sorts of things as Yahoo, but also a few extras (like the girlie games), but there are obviously a few things they don’t have too.

Overall, it’s a pretty good site to visit if you’re looking for an extra search choice, an extra email account, a bit of fun, or a news update. There are many reasons to visit actually. Reasons not to visit are few (so few that I can’t think of any). It is perhaps too full of info. More spread out would have made things easier. Good site though.