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See alt.hypertext for current comments.
The theory is that as one does research on the Web, current tools continually throw away information, so that when you want to look up something you ran across some time ago, your odds of finding it quickly are pretty slim.
So the first strategy of InfoRaptor will be to archive and word-index all visited pages, and especially all search- results.
But a local word-index is only going to be a slight improvement over Google, so the second level of attack is topical master-pages, that bring together on a single local (unpublished) webpage all the resources you've come across for a given topic (even likely links that you haven't followed yet).
Pages for publication will be represented as a subset of the master page, and InfoRaptor will allow the author to click on a section of a published page and jump to the corresponding part of the master page, where all the related-but-rejected links, and all the related search- queries, will be cached.
So the design challenge is to automate the maintenance of these master-pages as much as possible, so that they're useful, despite their gigantic size...
I've posted before to alt.hypertext about what I called 'action hypertext' [posts]-- this is the latest evolution of that. The (new) general idea is that you have a master- hierarchy of topics, and as you do research InfoRaptor will display your current place in that hierarchy, plus a range of nearby topics.
When you want to 'dismiss' a page, you select the best topic-match, and type a few words describing the page. (Action-hypertext theory suggests that there will be various standard categories that may be offered in a menu as well, like 'image' or 'etext' or 'analysis', or 'read later' or 'too deep' or 'too shallow' etc.)
The masterpage will remember the date, the annotations, the original link, and the local archived copy, sorted into a convenient spot under the proper subtopic.
You'll have the ability to flag search-strings and
websites for the bot to monitor for new content or
other changes. (One of the main functions is to
semi-automate finding substitute links when one goes
404.)
You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.
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