How many times have you been offline and wanted to do a quick websearch on a particular topic? Webaroo lets you pre-empt your offline search needs by pulling down topic specific 'WebPacks' of cached websites to your PC or Pocket PC device, or caching web sites you have specified, along with all the pages those sites link to.
Their blurb claims:
Webaroo servers crawl the web, analyze web pages and select the subset of pages that maximize Content Density (i.e. the most content value in the least storage size). Webaroo determines the content value based on the diversity and quality of the pages. The more diverse the set of pages, the more queries they are likely to be able to answer. The more high quality the pages, the more likely they are to contain meaningful information for users. ... Our content density software can be focused on the whole web, or on those parts of the web having to do with a specific topic (baseball, for example). The subset of pages it selects is packaged into a "Web Pack". A Web Pack is, quite simply, a collection of web pages, along with other meta-data that enables caching, search and updates to that subset of pages..
Downloaded Web Packs can also be synched with updated versions each time you are online.
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was - hmm, how about course related packs, where chunks of course relevant web are pulled into a pack. The size of the pack would mean that students could get different search results from each other depending on the search queries they use but each user's results would still be on topic.
The second thing I thought was: how about some OU course archive web packs, bundled by faculty or level - an OUpedia sort of thing (the same may work for the open content archive).
The third question that came to mind was: how could a Web Pack be integrated with a desktop search tool (by the by, I use Copernic Desktop Search)?
And offtopic of the OU, but possibly useful - how about a Wikipedia web pack?
Posted by ajh59 at April 11, 2006 09:47 AM