Bot News
ChangeTracker Gets Fresh Information

By Brian Proffitt

Search engine developer WisoSoftCom has a new product out on the market that promises to aid in the ongoing battle to find fresh information on the Web.

WisoSoftCom's ChangeTracker observes automatically Web content changes and records the modifications. It then reports back to the user that there was a change as well as what that change was.

Keeping track of certain Web sites has become an important task for many corporate users. As more information is being moved to the Web environment, more users want to track key aspects of that data and get notified of any change.

Examples of this kind of monitoring include watching inventory reports for certain products on commerce sites, tracking stock information, or perhaps monitoring a partner's corporate Web site for any changes that could potentially damage your site's links to theirs.

ChangeTracker is a client-server application that lets the user define a specific monitoring interface for each Web site the user wishes to track. Users can track a whole Web site or individual HTML elements.

WisoSoftCom has a demo of this product available on its Web site, which effectively demonstrates how this application works.

The interface for ChangeTracker is simple but functional. Configuration is a bit cumbersome, but not too hard to figure out. For this demo model, unfortunately, you can only monitor sites that are included with the demo package. German users will find the variety of sites included with the package acceptable, but English-speaking users don't have a lot of options to choose from.

The configuration structure of this demonstration version of ChangeTracker just emphasizes WisoSoftCom's intention to market this update bot to corporate clients.

After using ChangeTracker myself for a few days, I found the underlying technology (which is really what is getting showcased) to be pretty effective. The interface leaves much to be desired, however, as found Web pages are made to appear in a very short window within the application.

Of course you could argue that the interface is not that important for a demo model but in this case, I think this goes beyond aesthetics and actually hinders the performance of the application. A simple thing as widening the result window's height would make a world of difference.