Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Decent voicemail service |
| Disadvantages: |
useless search engine, other features pale in comparison to other sites |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
no |
Excite really isn't much of a search engine, the search facilities are one of the poorest I've seen. Out of all of the sample searches I've tried, they all failed miserably. Thankfully, there is much, much more to Excite than simply searching. Sign up for a free personal account and receive your own personal start page, email, voicemail/fax number, SMS sending and even take part in the interactive games.
Although none of the features are new, they might be considered adequate for less demanding users. The voicemail, provided by Virtualplus provides you with a local (0845) number, which makes a nice change from companies such as Yahoo! offering United States numbers. Of course, you can only check to see if you have new voicemail messages by checking into your Excite account, but this isn't really much of a problem if you plan to use it regularly. Technically,you're receiving an answerphone and fax machine for nothing, so that's a small price to pay.
However, the email service seems to be a bit of a let down. Out of all of the services I've used, this is the only one that puts an actual figure (1,000) to how many emails you can store, as well as having a not-very-impressive 3Mb storage limit. To be honest, it's very unlikely that you'll get even close to that 1,000 email limit, especially if you use your voicemail a lot, if you NEED to store 1,000 emails anyway, you've got problems! It still seems a bit over-restrictive though.
The SMS feature of Excite is not designed for heavy users... you are only allowed to send a pathetic 3 text messages a day. In the modern world where every man/woman/kid/rabbit has their own mobile phone, there's certainly the risk of using these up within minutes of signing on. Obviously, it's there to stop people causing hassle, but only 3??? Even worse, it's limited to 130 characters thanks to an advert slapped on the end.
As I mentioned, everyone has mobiles these days. Well, of course, not everyone, but quite a few people. If you require your Nokia phone to be customised with a cute graphic or ringtone, then there's also a section that lets you select or make your own. But don't disappear just yet, to order them, you must ring a phone number charged at.... £1.50 per minute, the call roughly lasting two minutes. No thanks.
Overall, poor search engine, poor email, excellent voicemail, poor SMS. Looking somewhere else would be a good idea.
very helpful
very helpful
very helpful
