Pinning down the fleeting Internet: Web crawler archives historical data for easy searching | University of Washington News and Information

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University of Washington researchers are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical Web sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

"Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today," said Eytan Adar, University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral student. "When you search for something online, you're only getting today's results."

Now, Adar and his colleagues at UW and Adobe Systems Inc. are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

"There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call 'the today Web' that it's kind of amazing that there's no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web," said Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who also worked on the application. One service, the Internet Archive, has been capturing old versions of Web sites for years, but the records for the stored sites are inconsistent, Weld said. More importantly, there's no easy way to search the archive.

With Zoetrope, anyone will be able to use easy keyword searches to find archived Web information or look for patterns over time. The research was presented Oct. 22 by Mira Dontcheva, the system's co-creator and a recently graduated UW computer science and engineering doctoral student now at Adobe Systems Inc., at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Monterey, Calif.

University of Washington researchers are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical Web sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

"Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today," said Eytan Adar, University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral student. "When you search for something online, you're only getting today's results."

Now, Adar and his colleagues at UW and Adobe Systems Inc. are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

"There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call 'the today Web' that it's kind of amazing that there's no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web," said Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who also worked on the application. One service, the Internet Archive, has been capturing old versions of Web sites for years, but the records for the stored sites are inconsistent, Weld said. More importantly, there's no easy way to search the archive.

With Zoetrope, anyone will be able to use easy keyword searches to find archived Web information or look for patterns over time. The research was presented Oct. 22 by Mira Dontcheva, the system's co-creator and a recently graduated UW computer science and engineering doctoral student now at Adobe Systems Inc., at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Monterey, Calif.

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