Strategies Change For Top Surfing

October 15, 1998

Strategies Change For Top Surfing

By Gene Koprowski

One of the most frustrating facets of life on-line is finding, and keeping, important information. Sure, you can surf to a Web site and bookmark the page. But what happens if the page is updated, or, worse, disappears? Then the facts you thought were just a few clicks away are no longer accessible.

“Web pages are like gardens. They change every single day,” says Daniel Janal, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the Online Marketing Handbook.

The growth of the Internet, and the constantly churning content of many high-profile Web sites, is proving to many long-time, smart users of the Web that new surfing strategies beyond bookmarking are needed to keep the information you need at your fingertips.

Saving Web content to your hard drive - or an external storage device - is the first step. Organizing that information into your own personal library is the next move, and the most important part of the process.

Where do you begin?

First, you can either buy, or download free, so-called “off-line browser” programs. These programs, like WebWacker (bluesquirrel.com/whacker/), and Hot Off The Web (hotofftheweb.com), enable you to copy entire Web pages, including text, HTML, GIF files, and download them on to a storage disk.

The programs enable you to search through your storage disk as if you were searching through a live Web connection. The software also can be programmed to go live on to the Web once a week, or even daily, to search through designated sites and provide updated information until the site ceases to exist.

“That is really great for people who are doing competitive research, or who are monitoring the price of a number of stocks,” notes Mr. Janal. “You get the information updated right away, without having to go through the process of getting on-line.”

The products are relatively inexpensive. Web Whacker is priced at US$49.95, while Hot Off The Web is priced at $29.95. Both require only a 486/66 PC with 8 MB of RAM.

There are other strategies that you can follow if you are not interested in paying for those kinds of software programs. For example, you could simply cut and paste the text from Web pages into a word-processing program.

The articles can be arranged by subject category, in much the same way that a Web search engine classifies content: there can be one file for stories about personal computers, another for articles about modems, and still another for copy concerning digital devices, like the Psion hand-held PC. Whatever subject areas are of interest to you are worth creating files for, experts note.

“Then, when you go back and write a report, you can go back to the original files, pull material out of them, and easily locate the time and date and publication for attribution,” says Mr. Janal.

Don’t rely solely on the “Save As . . .” function found on the Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator browsers. Often, saving a document from there to the hard drive will result in a file with a lot of encrypted drivel - basically the Web page in HTML code form, and, perhaps the URL of the coveted content.

How far should your organization and categorization go? That depends upon how active a Web surfer you are. For example, a heavy user such as William Gaultier, an executive at the Hoffman Agency, a hi-tech marketing agency, spends about four hours every day on the Web, and has had more than 860 bookmarks at any given time.
He saves the bookmarked pages to his hard drive, and has more than 20 categories into which he breaks them down. “It’s really like having a mini-electronic library,” says Mr. Gaultier. But you have to be the librarian, as well as the patron.

Saving huge numbers of files like these can take up a lot of disk space. But smart surfers like Mr. Janal and Mr. Gaultier tell of how they are constantly vetting their files, casting out information that is no longer relevant.

You also can save a lot of this information on well-indexed floppy disks for easy retrieval. Or, if you have an external CD-R or CD-RW drive, you can save it on CD-Rom, and have much more voluminous data files at your reach.