Webaroo - Searchable, Offline Web

Webaroo has launched a beta of their offline website browser and search tool. Webaroo lets users store content from any of their content channels, or any websites the user adds manually. If you need offline access to specific websites for any reason, this free application is worth a try.

The Webaroo client is generally designed for mobile notebook users; they also offer a client for Windows Mobile PDAs and Smartphones. Webaroo will gain popularity of course because it's free, but exposure is about to explode as Acer is going to start bundling it with their notebooks.

"Acer believes that the new, powerful ability to search the web offline will bring tremendous advantages for consumers and business people," said Campbell Kan, Head of Mobile Computing Business Unit, Acer Inc. "Acer is committed to being first-to-market with innovative products that are easy-to-use, dependable and empowering -- enabling our users to be more productive. We plan on incorporating Webaroo's software into Acer's mobile PCs. We look forward to creating mutual success for Acer and Webaroo and even greater satisfaction for our customers."

How Webaroo Works

Webaroo offers two ways to get and store offline content. First they have what are called web packs, collections of content geared toward a specific topic. Right now these packs are very limited, there's one for the World Cup, World News and a handful of cities around the world. The more powerful tool is their web caching system that lets users keep an offline copy of any website. Data can be updated manually or on a regular schedule when the computer is online.

Form for adding a new website (view large image)

When adding a new site, Webaroo offers several options regarding what to crawl and cache. Link depth, which only goes one deep, allows the user to cache just the linked page or pages that are one link deep as well. I'd like to see this option allow more depth, especially for links internal to the site being added. There is an option to include site links only or all links, which would include internal and external links, but again, only 1 level deep. If you select the images option, images on the host site will be displayed.

Status indicator (view large image)

Caching a website is surprisingly speedy. It took only a few minutes to get a copy of Brighthand.com, a bit longer for NotebookReview.com.

Cached version of Brighthand.com(view large image)

The cached view on the computer is a little ugly, but largely functional. I was able to browse through all of the current news, complete with images.

The Webaroo search is also pretty good. The results for my queries were relevant. The link descriptions were off a bit at times, but they were close enough to determine relevancy. Each link goes to a cached version, but if you're online, a "live" link will take you to the current version of that page.

PDA and Smartphone Access

While Webaroo offers a Windows Mobile client, the documentation surrounding it just gave me a lovely mess. I've come to learn from Webaroo reps that the installer is for Pocket PC 2003 only, not Windows Mobile 5, which is what I tried. So I can't speak to the effectiveness of the tools on a PDA, all I can say is Webaroo is going to update their application to better document PDA use, and if you have WM5, wait until they offer support before installing.

How to Get Webaroo

Webaroo can be downloaded for free here. Future versions will be advertising supported.

 

I don't understand why would a cached version be uglier than the original. Isn't that tool simply downloading the content ?

Can you explain what you meant ?

 

although it's an interesting idea, i don't think it's going to take off. internet access isn't that hard to get. i also can't imagine having an immediate need to search the web when i'm so far away from civilization that i cant get online. i'd more want acess to things like my email (and cellphone reception)

 

they also said that Acer would pre-install this application with 40GB of data. Can you imagine the surprise you'll have when you buy an 80GB laptop with something like 40 - 50GB already used for "web" content.

the lure of the informational / entertainment web is quite often dynamic content, such as say this forum that's updated by people posting every few seconds. IE and many other browsers already have a built-in tool to allow spidering a site to a certain number of link depths.

Hope the VCs didn't blow too much money on these guys. lol.

 

although webaroo is a noble idea, it's somewhat of a dinosaur already. just like dragonesse said, fast and easy web access today make this idea old. maybe if this came out when web access was still hard and slow, it would work. then again, downloading the web packs for it would be a total pain.

i think the only this would fly is if it focuses itself as an "encyclopedia britannica like" tool where you have access to updated information without using a search engine to search sites one by one for an info you need.

 

are there any security-related threats to using a program like webaroo? or is it just the same as regular web-browsing.

 

I think sites look worse because when the get cached they're also compressed or not able to handle some of the HTML or CSS code.

 

This is probably one of the worst thought-out ideas I've seen. I have several questions:
1. How is all that data ever going to get updated?
2. How often do you 'surf' offline? It is so common to find a wireless hotspot or something of the like these days.
3. It takes up so much space.
4. You can't send email, IM, post on forums . .only view data (obviously) - still a noteworty restriction.

 

1) It updates when you get online again.
2) You surf the cashed pages. While most people can get online, the campany I used to work for often had me in the sticks for sales calls, meetings. In some cases, it would have been nice to have a site or two cached for display purposes.
3) I tihnk the cap is 28MB, not sure how many sites you can fit into that.
4) Yeah, of course this is a limitation of being offline.

Look, I'm not saying this is the greatest tool ever, but I'm sure of everyone who's read this article, a few people thought it interesting. If you go places where you can't get online much or at all, this might be beneficial.

 

I think the idea is good.

If you'd like to have a few cached news site for a trip on the train or a plane .. not really productive, but it entertains

 

I think that if you could select the pages you wanted, that would be nice. But, it's a lot - 40GB - no one is ever going to surf all that.

I'm just wondering exactly how it would all get updated - not just a fraction . . you'd be surfing old information.

Agreed though, if you're going someplace where online connectivity is limited, it could be useful.

 

I don't see how this is a new idea at all, much less why it should get any press. You could already to this with internet explorer and drill as deep into the links as you wanted. I know, I used to do it for pages I wanted access to off line.

 

I think the idea is good... But I see very little use for this.

It'd take up a lot of valuable Hard Drive space, and if you really need a web page, just save it on your computer yourself... This'll be like Bloatware taken to the whole next level...

Instead of only taking up a few GB, it's half of the entire Hard Drive...