Zoetrope: That is the Web that Was

Update: Here’s the video

Eytan et al have been working on Zoetrope for a while, but here is a new article/video that shows of how far they’ve come. Zoetrope is a combination of a browser and a web archive that allows the user to manipulate the temporal point of view of a web page (or parts of a web page).

The Internet contains vast amounts of information, much of it unorganized. But what you see online at any given moment is just a snapshot of the Web as a whole -- many pages change rapidly or disappear completely, and the old data gets lost forever.

"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.

(Note to UW – make your videos trivially embedable).

Comments

[Greg Linden]

Nice demo in that video! Fun!

By the way, if you are interested in a more formal writeup of the system, Adar et al. have a UIST 2008 paper on Zoetrope at

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1449756