One of the niftiest operating-system components that Apple has released in recent years is Sherlock, what Apple calls your "personal research assistant."

With Mac OS 9, the company released a new and improved version of Sherlock, dubbed Sherlock 2 (what did you expect it to be called --Barnaby?).

In case you're not familiar with Sherlock, it's Apple's system-level Internet and networking power tool that replaces Apple's Find File function. It's a really useful tool. Need help in using it even more efficiently? Elementary, my dear Watson.

Cruising the internet channels

We won't go into the basics of using Sherlock 2. You can figure that out on your own.

But we will recommend taking advantage of Sherlock 2's channels feature, which lets you select which search engines you wish to use to find the information you need.

You can create your own Internet channels for searching only the sites you're interested in. You create them by using the New Channel command in the Sherlock program. To create a new Internet channel:

Open the Channels menu and choose New Channel. Enter a name for the channel. Open the Channel type pop-up menu and choose a channel type. To change the channel picture, drag a picture to the Icon box, or click the arrows next to the icon. Click OK. To add a Web site search engine to this channel, download a Sherlock plug-in from the site and drag it to the search sites list in the main Sherlock window. Or drag the plug-in to the channel's well in the main Sherlock window. More on this in a moment.

To edit an Internet channel that you've created, select the channel, open the Channels menu, and choose Edit Channel, then make your changes. To remove a site from a channel that you've created, just drag the site from the Search Sites list in the main Sherlock window to the Trash.

Tips for Searching and Saving

You can save some time if you want to search a particular folder or group of folders. Try this: Select the Files channel, then drag the folder or group of folders to the volumes list.

You can save still more time by modifying the search criteria in the More Search Options window. Open the window by clicking the Edit button. (To move forward to the next text field in the More Search Options window, press the Tab key. To move backward through the fields, press the Shift and Tab keys.) To find files that have the same characteristics as a particular file:

Select the search criteria you want to use (such as kind or label), but don't enter any information in the text fields. Drag the item from the Finder into the More Search Options window, click OK, then click the Search button.

Once you've found the file or info you need, you can drag it from the Sherlock window to any location on your desktop. But if you want to copy it instead of just moving it, press the Option key as you drag it out of the Sherlock window. To make an alias of a found item, press the Command and Option keys as you drag it.

If you wish to save a list of all the URLs that you've found, click in the Items Found window, select all (command-A), and then copy (command-C). The URLs for all of the items in the list will be copied to the Clipboard, ready for pasting wherever you wish.

Or you can also save URLs by dragging items from the Items Found window to the Desktop. This creates "Internet location files" that you can double-click, thus zapping you to the Web sites.

You can even use text in a document as search criteria. Do this by highlighting the text in question, Control-click on it to bring up a Contextual Menu, and choose Search Internet from the resulting menu. Voila! Sherlock will start a search based on the highlighted text.

You can also save your search criteria for future use if you wish. After you've implemented a search, go to Sherlock's File menu and select Save Search Criteria. It'll save a Saved Internet Search File, which can be double-clicked to start a search.

Playing With Plug-ins

You'll also want to ensure that you're using the latest plug-ins. For better or worse, Sherlock 2 doesn't have an option to manually check for updated search sites. It automatically searches for and downloads any updated search sites. This means you'll no longer get a dialog telling you that there are new versions; they'll simply be installed for you.

Also, don't consider the list of sites in Sherlock's own Search Sites window as the be-all and end-all of search engines. You can add to the list practically any Web site that has a search engine as long as you have a plug-in file for the site.

Where to Find Plug-ins?

Apple offers a whole bunch of them, including one for its own Web site . Other places to find plug-ins are the Sherlock Internet Search Archives and the Sherlock Collection. If you can't find a plug-in for your favorite site, check the site itself. It may have its own plug-in posted. If not, recommend to the site's Webmaster that such a plug-in be developed. (Tell them to try the freebie Sherlock's Pipe, which helps build Sherlock plug-ins.

To use a new plug-in, download it and drag it to your System Folder icon. The next time you use Sherlock, the new site will appear in the list.

By the way, plug-ins written for Sherlock 1.x work fine with Sherlock 2 in any Searching channel, and will display the page name and server on which the page resides. However, since the People, News, and Shopping types of channels are new to Sherlock 2, new plug-ins will have to be written that correspond to the new column headings for these channel types.

Turbo-Charging Sherlock

Once you've learned how to ace Sherlock's Search and Save features, you can also speed up its content indexing and searches by cutting down the number of languages Sherlock is set to recognize. To do this:

Choose the Preferences command from the Edit menu; Click Languages; Uncheck the languages you won't need to index.

Also, by default, Sherlock only lets you view six plug-ins at a time. You can change this by grabbing and installing Watson. Once installed, the shareware utility automatically resizes the Sherlock Search Internet window pane, depending on how many search-engine plug-ins you have installed.

If you don't want all of your plug-ins enabled at the same time, you should check out the free No Shoot! Sherlock.

You can also save some time with Sherlock Menu, a $5 shareware utility that installs a system-wide shortcut menu to the Sherlock Search tool now part of the Mac OS. Then you can quickly access the Sherlock application from any running program. The tool is also available as a Control Strip module for those who have smaller screens or simply don't want to clutter up the Menu Bar with icons.

Contributing Editor Dennis Sellers also writes Mac News.