By DAVE FARRELL
Syndicated Columnist

The more I use the Internet, the more I rely on shortcuts to help me cut through the clutter and distractions I find online. These shortcuts have sliced hours off my surfing time each week and have increased the productivity of the time I do spend online.

What do I mean by shortcuts? Things like having news updates e-mailed to me instead of having to go out onto the Net looking for information. Things like registering with sites to receive a notice when the information on that site has changed, which saves me the time and hassle of making countless trips to view the same information over and over again.

The latest shortcut trick I've been using involves a concept called "metabrowsing." That term refers to the practice of using software to automatically visit several different Web sites and delivering those pages to you in one tidy package.

You may be familiar with metasearch engines, which allow you to use one interface page to reach several search engines. If you've used these super searchers you know how effective they can be. Metabrowsers work on the same principle -- they allow you to "stack up" the addresses you want to visit and they deliver them all back to you in one long, scrolling page.

The metabrowser that often is credited with starting this technique is Quickbrowse (www.quickbrowse.com).

Quickbrowse was developed by Marc Fest, a free-lance journalist who realized he was spending a lot of his online research time jumping from one site to another, waiting for pages to load. Fest figured he could eliminate the long waits if he looked for pages concurrently and loaded them all at the same time. The little program he wrote to do that became Quickbrowse.

Quickbrowse is very simple to use. Once you register on the site (it's free) you can immediately begin building the lists of Web pages you want Quickbrowse to visit for you. You can change or alter your lists any time you want. Once you've finalized them, you can save them for future use. You also can have Quickbrowse surf your lists and e-mail the results to you on a schedule you determine.

Let's say you've asked Quickbrowse to visit the Yahoo! home page, the home page for the Los Angeles Times and your favorite horoscope page. Quickbrowse will deliver those pages in one document, with the Yahoo! page on top, followed by the LA Times and horoscope pages. All the links on those pages will work, allowing you to burrow further into the sites if you want.

I use Quickbrowse as my personal paperboy. I've set up lists to check my favorite newspaper pages, along with stock pages for companies I'm tracking and pages of other sites I visit frequently.

I have Quickbrowse e-mail those pages to me so they will be waiting for me when I get up in the morning. The e-mail comes as an HTML page, which means I can paste it directly into a browser and I'm instantly viewing the Web pages I want. No more waiting for pages to load, no more typing and clicking long Internet addresses. I love it.

Seen anything interesting on the Information Highway you'd like to share with others? Drop an e-mail message to Dave Farrell at: roadside@cris.com.

Copyright 2000. The Holland Sentinel.