Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

A Third Voice for the Intranet that Adds Some Features

Author:Brian Carnell
Posted:10/17/1999; 6:41:05 PM
Topic:A Third Voice for the Intranet that Adds Some Features
Msg #:12103
Prev/Next:12102 / 12104

I use a product called "Catch the Web" to grab web pages for my personal use where I need to reference what the page looked like say today. Anyway, I've got no problem with these utilities that make it easy for users to automate the "Save As" option in most browsers.

What I would have a problem with is if people then those saved pages into a database and served them up over an Intranet to thousands of uers, perhaps after modifying the content or adding comments. Well, wouldn't you know it, that's exactly the sort of product that Catch The Web has decided to offer.

From their home page: "Math Strategies is the creator of CatchTheWeb Enterprise, a software application and service that helps your team pool Web research. Authorized members capture what they find on the Web, add a note, and immediately make it available through their organization's research home page. The actual HTML on the screen, its graphics and other components are stored on the database server. A powerful search capability is made possible by full text indexing. CatchTheWeb Personal is a desktop application for individuals. If you are interested in this standalone product, click here."

Any thoughts here? Does an organization have the right to maintain web pages and serve those up even if the maintaining web site doesn't want this? For example, the Washington Post charges to uses its archives. Using a product like this, however, I could simply archive every day's Washington Post and then allow everybody in my corporation full text searching and retrieval (this to me is what differentiates the product from most caching servers and the like which don't hold on to material forever if my understanding is correct, though I could be wrong).

BTW, although I rely on it if the Catch The Web personal version is any indication there's no way these people have the capability to make a useable product that does what they claim. The product works for me but is slower than molasses and creates files that are extremely bloated.

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