Web Research -->> WOW!

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 4, 2007 at 01:01 PM

Cassius/JJ,

I’ve been using Web Research for some years. It used to be called ContentSaver, and there are numerous posts here and on the Zoot forum abut it. It also has the ability to generate hyperlinks to its content. These can be inserted in other programs - very useful for working with Zoot. See
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/1860. Unfortunately its name makes it hard to search for efficiently, here or with google.

The network extension is a pretty hefty $45 or so on top of the base price of $45 for WR itself. I was tempted to buy the add-on but was deterred by the price and technical requirements:
- some form of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 (there is a free version):
- Operating system: Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, or NT 4.0 Server (but small groups and singletons can use XP, apparently).

It looked like a bit of a resource hog,so I haven’t tried it yet. How does it work out, JJ?

Although the indexing function JJ mentions is very useful, as he comments it ought to be on the base product. Also there is the usual vexed question - which still applies AFAIK to Surfulater - that external engines currently cannot index the contents of most software of this type (Firefox’s Scrapbook and NetSnippets are two exceptions). This is essential where data is being held over a range of software plus on the windows filing system itself. Of course there are workarounds; one can export the contents of WR in a form that can be indexed by a desktop search engine. And dtSearch, for example, can actually index and search WR’s html documents because these have clear delimiters that can be picked up by DTS. Not so for other file-types, however.

That all said, I like WR a lot, although I am watching Surfulater closely. I don’t use WR for composing stuff, but it has an html editor. It also has a useful “categories” feature, as JJ pointed out. My main interest is in using it in tandem with Zoot as a repository for material Zoot can’t (yet!) handle. WR’s hyperlinking feature is essential for this.

Derek