Free Reference

Serendipity is to procrastination as Doug Flutie's final-second game-winning touchdown pass securing Boston College's 1984 victory over the University of Miami is to imminent defeat—a Hail Mary that saves the proverbial day in the darkest minute of the 11th hour. Not unlike an electronically grid-locked reviewer of free reference web sites whose late Sunday night heave ends up not in the sure hands of Flutie's wide receiver, Gerard Phelan, but in the virtual, if no less secure, embrace of SPRINGO.COM, a useful and rather lovely navigational tool for the web.

The propietary interest of Net Express Ltd., Springo is a shortcutting tool that yokes together users and thousands of the most widely popular and often visited web sites arranged alphabetically by subject category. The simple and stylistically lean home page enables users either to do a free text search or to select from among the some 1200 alphabetically arranged subjects in the topic list.

Selecting, for example, college football (go, Blue!) yields a total of 23 sites arranged numerically by popularity. Of particular interest is the snappy homepage screen shot of each site and the portal-style display that invites direct access to each URL.

In addition to web-site locations via the subject directory tree, direct user access is also provided with the Springo Express browser. Narrow and expand features are offered with the express browser to further facilitate open searching. The topic list, while quotidian (tax planning and advisory, marriage, recipes, etc.) and predictably mainstream (home, garden and outdoors, hobbies, pets), can also be diverse (Bollywood films and music) and contains a number of hardcore sexual topics. Porn directories, porn magazines and communities, gay porn, and group sex are among the listed subjects.

BOTTOM LINE Like everything else in the electronic dance hall of the Internet, the secular and worldly, the sacred and profane here do a nonstop Texas two-step. Google won't be looking over its shoulder anytime soon, but Springo does provide a nice little bounce in the step of the unfocused searcher.