The Internet contains a vast amount of
information, much of which is disorganized. But what you see online at any given time
is only a snapshot view of the network as a whole, as many pages change very quickly or disappear entirely, and those old contents are lost forever.
"Your browser is just a window within the network as it exists today," explains Eytan Adar (
University of Washington). "When you find something online, is getting only the results of this."
Now, Adar and his colleagues at the University of Washington and Adobe Systems Inc. are storing historical sites that users can easily track a user-friendly application called Zoetrope.
"There are many ways to find, manipulate and display data in what we call" Network Today, "it is astonishing that there is no way to do something similar in Red Ephemeral," said Dan Weld, a professor of engineering and the sciences computing at the University of Washington, who also worked on the application. A service of the Internet Archive (Internet Archive) has been capturing old versions of websites for years, but the records are stored in the variable sites, according to Weld. More importantly, there is no easy way to search the archive.
With Zoetrope, anyone will be able to use simple keyword searches to find web
information on file or to search for patterns over time.
Zoetrope can also help to capture and analyze information that otherwise might not be available anywhere.
Zoetrope could eventually be incorporated in any other browser. If you wish to browse through past versions of a particular website, it would move a slider to see more and more old versions.
Users can view historical data by moving the slider, but are more sophisticated. If you are looking for some numerical data, such as the price of petrol over time, the program can draw some graphics.
Right now, every hour Zoetrope is storing a new version approximately 1,000 different sites. Has been running for four months, so that the records do not go beyond that, but the creators of Zoetrope expected end to the program by incorporating the information of about 14 years of records from the Internet Archive.