Adobe and University of Washington researchers have created a search application called Zoetrope (see video presentation) that will enable users to explore not just current Web pages but also earlier versions of those pages. The search app is designed to overcome the fact that Web pages change frequently and that earlier versions of a page can be otherwise impossible to access via typical search tools. Zoetrope can be used to search pages in their entirety or just sections of them.
"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, in a statement. (He does site the Internet Archive as one tool, but notes it's not easy to search). Zoetrope currently tracks updates to about 1,000 Web sites, but the researchers behind it hope to make it much more comprehensive. After all, it's only been running for about 4 months. While Zoetrope might sound like something for heavy duty scientific research, its creators say it is really for casual researchers. Zoetrope's designers say it could be integrated into common browsers. The program is expected to be made available for free, perhaps by next summer, according to the University of Washington. The NSF and other outfits have funded this project.
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