Greg R. Notess Reference Librarian Montana State University

On The Net Internet Current Awareness From: ONLINE 23(2):75-78, March-April 1999.

Keeping completely current with all the changes on the Web is an impossible task. But there are several services that can help by providing a current awareness service for monitoring changes in specific Internet information resources, from Web pages to news sites to Usenet news. The idea of a current awareness service, something that notifies a user when new documents are available, has been a standard offering from commercial online services for years. Current awareness services are a natural match for the capabilities of the Internet, but have been slow to win popular appeal.

Current awareness tools are basically push products. Long before the idea of push technology was popularized, current awareness services were pushing new bibliographic references from online databases to people by paper mail or email. And while it lacks the multimedia pizzazz of some of the over-hyped push technologies that have failed to become the new killer technology, the simple push of email remains an extremely important way to deliver information content.

So what kind of information can Internet current awareness tools push? In general, they can push any kind of information on the Web. While traditional current awareness tools include bibliographic information from published resources, Internet current awareness tools can email notices of Web page changes, new search engine results, the most recent Usenet news articles, and current news stories.

The available Internet current awareness services are still first generation tools. Of the ones mentioned shortly, only a few are trying to sell a commercial product in addition to their free service. The companies are not likely candidates for stratospheric initial public offerings or buyouts--these services are used only by a small section of the Internet public. Consequently, the future development and improvement will likely be slow. These products may well remain as specialists' services, but they can be important information gathering tools.

NETMIND'S MIND-IT

On the free side, Mind-It tracks Web pages. After registering and setting up some URLs, Mind-It sends email when the registered Web pages have changed. While the basic principle is fairly straightforward, Mind-It comes with a number of options, including the ability to set the frequency, the part of the page to check, and what kind of notification to deliver. Mind-It can also be configured to send a message when the Web page moves or when it ceases to exist.

The addresses for several pages can be added on one Multiple Pages form or one at a time. Mind-It provides an option to describe the page and to categorize it into a Mind-It folder, which enables the user to group similar current awareness settings together. The pages can be checked daily, every other day, or weekly. After Mind-It compares the old page to the current page and finds a difference, it sends an email notification. It can even send the new page as an attachment.

Many Web pages change daily. Sometimes it's just a date, graphic, or advertisement that changes while the real information content remains static. Mind-It provides several options to address situations like this and provides more flexibility in what part of a Web page is monitored. This Tracking feature, as Mind-It calls it, defaults to sending a notification if there is any kind of change on the page. But it also offers tracking by Keywords, Text, Images/Links, Bounded Text, Surrounded Text, and Form Results.

Select the tracking of Keywords, and Mind-It will only send a notification if one of the specified keywords or phrases changes, is removed, or is added. For example, set up a Mind-It profile to watch for the phrase "bug fixes" or just the word "patch" on the Windows 98 update page and when a bug fix or patch becomes available, Mind-It can send you an email notification. To only track a portion of a page, use the Text tracking option and then copy and paste the exact section of text from the page that should be tracked.

The Images/Links option is the only one that tracks changes to the underlying HTML code. All the others simply monitor changes to the information content and ignore changes to the HTML coding. To monitor changes to image names or to any of the links on a page, use Images/Links tracking.

For more sophisticated tracking, Mind-It offers Bounded Text and Surrounded Text. The Bounded Text prompts for a beginning and ending phrase to watch, while the Surrounded Text prompts for a phrase and the number of words before and after it to monitor. Form tracking is the last of the specialized tracking options. This can be used to monitor how the output of a form might change. For example, form tracking makes it possible to be notified of changes to the results of a specific AltaVista or HotBot search. It monitors changes to the output of a form submitted with a specific set of criteria.

USES FOR MIND-IT

Organizations' pages that offer an archive of press releases or any other kinds of periodic announcements make excellent candidates for Mind-It. Infrequently updated pages that you would not typically visit on a daily basis are other possibilities for a Mind-It list. Pages that change daily and warrant daily visits are not.

In this free version, one major complaint is that the email notifications do not note what the specific change is. That capability is available in its commercial Enterprise Minder product. One work-around for Mind-It users is to save a copy of the page on a local computer, and then use that file to compare with the updated version when you are next notified of a change. Or for another alternative, monitor the same page with javElink.

javElink

InGenius Technologies is the same company that provides Daily Diffs (http://www.dailydiffs.com), which monitors thousands of popular, dynamic Web pages selected by InGenius staff. Both Daily Diffs and javElink provide similar information about the tracked Web pages. Figure 1 shows one example of the kind of information available. Click on the Show History icon for both a graphical representation of page changes over time and extracts of the sections changed. The Show Detail icon provides even more details as to what aspects of the page changed, including what was deleted and what was added.

The free version of javElink will only follow up to 20 pages. However, it also allows the uploading of up to 200 Netscape bookmarks for tracking. Combining the detailing of changes from javElink with the email notification capability of Mind-It can help make up for some of the lacks of both services.

TRACKING SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS

The Informant

On the search engine side, belying its academic roots, it gives a maximum of three searches that can be run. Only four search engines are offered: Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista. The full power of the advanced searching capabilities of each search engine is not available. Instead, the Informant only provides an option for either ANDing all the terms or combining multiple terms with OR.

In each of the three available searches, only one search engine can be monitored at a time. In addition, the only time intervals available for the monitoring frequency are 3, 7, 14, 30, and 60. Yes, that's days, not hours.

The Informant can be licensed for use on an intranet or on the Internet. If it is licensed and you have the UNIX platform to run it on, it can be configured to monitor additional search engines, more search terms, and at more frequent intervals.

The Informant also includes a Web page change tracking system, with up to five URLs that can be entered. While the Informant is less sophisticated than most of the other services discussed here, it can be effective for those only interested in a couple of searches on the specific search engines available.

TracerLock

TracerLock is only somewhat more robust than the Informant and is more limited in other ways. TracerLock offers up to five Web searches for tracking and they may expand that number. On the other hand, TracerLock only uses AltaVista. No other search engines are available.

By relying exclusively on AltaVista, the full power of AltaVista's advanced search syntax can be used. The searches are run using the AltaVista advanced search form, so use Boolean operators and the other capabilities available from the advanced form rather than the + - system of the simple search form. Figure 2 shows the screen used for entering the searches to be monitored along with samples of searches. Complex queries can be entered, and the box scrolls right for longer search statements. The date to the right is set by default to three days prior to the day the searches are set up. The date is used in the AltaVista search as a date limit to find the most recently changed pages. TracerLock will only report the first ten such changed pages per search.

USENET NEWS

Since these services do not have the financial backing of large corporations or the preponderance of use that the portals, search engines, and subject directories have, they may be considerably less reliable. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any of these services will be around next week, that they will continue to deliver their product, or that they will run it the same way tomorrow. Many of the services mentioned here do have some track record of success and reliability, but, as with so much on the Internet, there is no guarantee of permanence.

So what alternatives are there for current awareness of Usenet news postings when Reference.com is down? Using Mind-It's form tracking capabilities in conjunction with a DejaNews search form is one possibility. TracerLock is another.

Just as TracerLock can monitor up to five AltaVista Web searches, it also can handle up to five AltaVista Usenet searches. Again, the full capabilities of the advanced search syntax can be used. The date limit captures the recent postings, and AltaVista does have a separate database of Usenet postings from both DejaNews and Reference.com.

But also check back with Reference. com. By the time this is published, it should be up and running again. Try to log in or to establish a new account. If it ends in an error message, it is still broken. If not, it may be available again as a Usenet current awareness tool.

NEWS INDEX

Sign up for News Index Delivered and up to five alerts will be sent via email to you every day with updates describing new pages or articles on the news media sites that News Index covers. A user can specify a single word, several words, or a phrase to be searched. An extract from the beginning of the page found for the chosen search terms will be included in the email message, and the user can determine how many lines of the extract to include.

While News Index is a great way to watch for the occurrence of certain words across hundreds of daily updated news Web sites, it can become annoying. Unlike the other email deliveries mentioned previously, News Index Delivered sends one message per search request every day, even if the day's news has no hits.

It helps greatly to use some email filtering to automatically send any empty results straight to the trash folder. Email filtering can also be useful in organizing other current awareness profiles, especially if multiple services and profiles end up generating dozens of email messages a day.

These Internet current awareness tools are still in their early stages of development. Far more sophisticated features could be added to each of them, but even at their basic level, they can be an important resources for staying current with changes to selected Internet information resources. Their free availability provides information professionals with an important tool in the never-ending task of trying to track current information resources available on the Net.

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